5 ms·

I think I was trying to get my entire music collection to fit onto my iPod, which at that time only had 10GB of space. And also, I love to optimize things, so

• kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  It would be better to just reencode tracks with VBR capped to 224 or 160 max bitrate.
  • cylon13 5y ago
    It would certainly not be better to crunch the quality than to remove useless zero bytes.
  • megablast 5y ago
    Rencoding is an awful idea.
    • mayli 5y ago
      Not really, if you take A/B/X test and realize modern codec can be transparent at low bitrate (e.g. opus@128kpbs)
      • xxpor 5y ago
        opus didn't exist when people were worried about 10 gb iPods
        • RealStickman_ 5y ago
          And also can't be played on said ipods.
        • fomine3 5y ago
          But AAC than MP3?
        • folkrav 5y ago
          In all fairness, it wasn't that long ago Apple were still selling iPod Touch with 8GB base storage, having tons of storage is a relatively new thing for most people. But with that specific 10GB metric, I'd assume we're speaking about those earlier scrollwheel iPods.
      • bscphil 5y ago
        OP specified reencoding, which probably means converting lossy to lossy. Despite the fact that modern codecs (and even mp3, LAME is transparent at V2~192kbps for most tracks and everything except killer samples at V0~256kbps) are generally very transparent at low bitrates, the same guarantee does not apply when encoding lossy to lossy. Think about it, if transparency guarantees applied for lossy transcodes, you could encode mp3 -> mp3 thousands for times with no generational loss. This clearly isn't possible. Of course, you could rip all your files again in a better codec, but the time required to do that is pretty intense.
        • lxgr 5y ago
          > if transparency guarantees applied for lossy transcodes, you could encode mp3 -> mp3 thousands for times with no generational loss That's not really a counterexample for the idea that one pass of lossy -> lossy reencoding doesn't necessarily mean certain doom for audio quality.
        • copperx 5y ago
          When Apple reencoded its music library, you didn't assume lossy to lossy, did you?
  • _t2kx 5y ago
    if you had a lossless source then sure, otherwise lossy to lossy transcoding is not great.
• scrollaway 5y ago
  > As a teenager, I probably had more time on my hands back then Ain't this the reason why most of us ended up here :)