TRUE BITRATE - how to calculate bitrate of mp3, page 3

AndyP1981 I WAS THE FORUM on July 7th, 2012 / post 49829

slash wrote:
thanks, RichTee!! good info!!

i liked today's example of upencoding.. several acts from Rock In Rio Festival were broadcast on youtube. and recorded.. and ended up being shared all over the net by direct download sites as 320kbps files. while youtube is a video streaming platform that doesn't really care about audio, thus the latter streams at most 96kbps.. 320 vs 96.. of my fcking god...

and another example, one of those sets i came across was a scene release.. group EITHELMp3 has released 2 versions of Carl Cox @ Rock in Rio 2012, both of them were VBR average at 224, both of them had SAT aka Satellite as their source... another OMFG.. they gotta be kidding? is it an error? or are they so arrogant to put source SAT, while it's a simple stream.

Utter stupidity :thumbsdown:

RichTee Moderator on July 8th, 2012 / post 49863

Yeah, that's another thing........

I was always a fan of radio SAT rips in their native format.... so usually as an MP2 unless it's SiriusXM.

As basically, most satellite radio still uses MP2 (well in the UK and Europe anyway).

By the time it's been re-encoded to MP3, there's always a slight loss of quality and how do you know the bloke doing it has got the correct settings for optimal quality etc. You just don't!

Why the release groups don't offer an MP2 as well for certain shows/sets that are popular (e.g. Essential Mix) I don't know.

At least that way people have a choice. At the moment everything is converted to MP3.... meaning that if, in the future, MP3 becomes defunked, you'd need to re-encode your files again to the latest codec of the day... e.g. AAC or whatever. So more loss of quality. It's always best to keep the music file in it's native format if possible to maximise quality, in my humble opinion.

That's another reason why I hate my iPod, no support for MP2 , Ogg, Flac, Musepack or anything other than AAC and MP3. :shoot2:

I used to rip SAT streams to my PC, (BBC, Kiss FM etc). But as I have to re-encode the buggers now anyway to MP3 to get them on my iPod, there's no point anymore. I might as well just get the scene release or go to TMB etc. Damn you Apple. (I listen to the bulk of my music on my iPod these days as I'm usually out of the house.)

Only good thing about the iPod is that the BBC iPlayer streams (The AAC LC ones) will download and play on your iPod with little effort and no re-encoding. So I don't really need to rip from sat now anyway.

AndyP1981 I WAS THE FORUM on July 8th, 2012 / post 49873

personally if I rip something....I tend to rip it in whatever the stream is....for my own personal use. I've recorded lots of things wrongly because I had no clue. Like that Danny Howells mix richie? the one I sent you, it was probably encoded at 96/112 and then reencoded at 192. Which now makes no fucking sense but I recorded it for my own personal use basically and in 2002, I had no clue.

most stuff I recorded for my own personal use is absolute shite for quality at times but you just want to hear the stuff.

mind you, the danny howells - essential selection holds up well. Even a decade later

tis one of the reasons I like soundcloud because you get the artists themselves encoding it from the laptop or whatever and its not reencoded. So if its 320 on there and Ralph Lawson says it is....usually its 320.