4 ms·
Why on earth would you transcode the recordings to mp3 -_- Flac is perfectly capable of decent compression and won't permanently damage these historical recordi
by bitJericho 12y ago
Why on earth would you transcode the recordings to mp3 -_- Flac is perfectly capable of decent compression and won't permanently damage these historical recordings.
- klodolph 12y ago2:1 is hardly what I'd call "good compression" for audio. At reasonable bit rates, MP3 is sonically transparent, except for the region above 15 kHz which is almost certainly not of interest in these recordings. This is the conclusion you get from doing actual scientific studies that compare the audio fidelity of different encodings, although if you have some data that uses human subjects which shows otherwise, I'd be glad to look at it. 8:1 or better is probably fine for recordings like this.
- aidenn0 12y agoI thought that mp3 was not transparent at any bitrate for certain percussive sounds? There certainly are several other lossy formats which are though (e.g. AAC, vorbis, opus, musepak).
- jacquesm 12y agomp3 is far better than the source material here even at relatively low bit rates. So even though in principle you are right and flac would have been better it would also have been overkill.
- bitJericho 12y agoIt's not overkill when the space required is absurdly cheap. 2TB for under 100 usd in the US.
- jacquesm 12y agoNote that the files are not just stored but in this case also transmitted. And I know that the 'storage is cheap' and 'bandwidth is cheap' mantras are thrown about all the time and yet, I feel that it is perfectly ok to select your algorithms with care.
- bitJericho 12y agoI'd have no objection to how he chose to transmit the audio. But in the article he mentions that he transcodes them to MP3 in order to save space.
- aw3c2 12y agoThen you already know the answer to your original question.