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I would have thought reencoding MP3 to MP4 would lose quality, even going to a much higher bitrate. Why not leave MP3s as MP3s?
by askvictor 2y ago
I would have thought reencoding MP3 to MP4 would lose quality, even going to a much higher bitrate. Why not leave MP3s as MP3s?
- qntmfred 2y agothey're using AAC for the audio which has many benefits compared to mp3 or wav. MP4 also offers more comprehensive metadata options.
- iforgotpassword 2y agoBut a reencode is a reencode, you're gonna sacrifice some quality... (even if inaudible to human ears at 160kbits)
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- mikae1 2y agoI interpret the below quote as: if there was a wav file and an mp3 file, they dumped the mp3 and created an mp4/aac from the wav (saving both the wav and the mp4/aac pair). Where there only was an mp3 file I assume they kept the mp3. Hence, not a lossy transcoding process. > Some radio broadcasts were stored as mp3 and wav files, with accompanying checksum files. Other broadcasts were only stored as mp3. Before the re-archiving process began, it was decided to generate new MP4 playback files from the wav files to replace the varying qualities of the old mp3 files.
- torbjornbp 2y agoThis is correct. The mp3 is a an access file sitting on our streaming servers (wowza), outside of the preservation environment. The old access files were of very low quality, so new m4a/aac files were created. In the cases where we only had mp3 files, the mp3 file was preserved as our master in the preservation environment, with a copy sent to the streaming servers.
- mannyv 2y agoWhy wowza instead of using backblaze or a some other cheap service? Backblaze has no egress, pair it with fastly for a super cheap cdn.
- torbjornbp 2y agoOur wowza streaming servers are hosted in-house, and are integrated with our authentication software. I don't know the nitty gritty details about the solution though, access is outside of my domain
- cormorant 2y agoIt sounded to me like they are encoding lossless WAV to lossy MP4, and replacing MP3s that were also from the same WAV, and in any case also keeping the WAV. That's why it was notable that in a couple of cases where the WAV was corrupt, they kept the original MP3 as being now the 'best available' copy. In no case did they transcode MP3->MP4.
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