Star Nation

[Paul Mather]

On Tue, 18 Jul 2000, Ted Jackson jr. wrote:

=> BTW, I've never actually heard an MP-3 [sounds like a German
=> submachine gun!]  Is the sound quality as bad as Courteney says?

The answer is "it depends."  It depends upon:

a) the source material (garbage in, garbage out);
b) the encoder used to encode the source
c) the bitrate used for encoding (higher is better, quality-wise)
d) the encoder settings used in encoding (to tweak the process)
e) the decoder used to play back what the encoder encoded

I'd say that (a)--(d) are far more important than (e), as most hardware
and decoding software can handle the job nicely (and, decoding is less
intensive a process than encoding).

Be aware that Layer 3 was actually designed with low bitrates
specifically in mind, i.e., for streaming audio over modem-rate
connections, and a lower bitrate means more audio quality lost.  So,
either you save file size and download time, or preserve audio
quality.  Which would you prefer?

In the end, it's all about quality control.  Some people don't care for
that, or are oblivious.  So, you get bad "MP3s."

If you want to hear what one sounds like, and you have the bandwidth,
check out some of my Gov't Mule MPEG audio files available via anonymous
FTP from gromit.dlib.vt.edu under /pub/emule/audio.  (There's also
Hawkwind and BOC under /pub/boc-l/audio.)

Cheers,

Paul.

e-mail: paul at gromit.dlib.vt.edu

"Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production
 deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid."
        --- Frank Vincent Zappa