Introduction into
compressed computer music
Here are some hints for those who decided to organize their musical collection. For sure, if you're a professional musician and have a huge experience of work with digital music, you need not read this stuff, otherwise you should. I think you may find something useful here.
Grabbing Music
- Use Audiograbber or any other CD ripper to grab your Audio disks into WAVs before encoding. You might also encode files directly from the program, but working with WAV files could be a good solution for experienced users, who may wish to set up all the encoding parameters manually.
- Buffered Burst Copy is the best grabbing method for most situations.
- Use Sync ripping method if you have damaged audio disks or a poor CDROM drive.
- Try to use the digital ripping method, when possible. Analog recording will make much more distortions.
- Try not to use your computer intensively while ripping; this could affect the quality (gaps or clicks).
Audio formats
What's the main difference between lossy and loseless compression? Just when you decompress the file, encoded by a lossy method, it doesn't stay the same as it was before compression: its content is changed, even though you may see (hear?) no difference between these two files. By throwing away some information, which is considered to be irrelevant lossy formats allow much better compression, than the loseless ones.
Loseless compression
- Use loseless compression, like Monkey Audio or WaveZIP instead of high bitrate MP3. Due to the algorithms used this doesn't affect quality in any way. The compression ratio often is about 1:2.
- You could always decompress the file into an ordinary wave file and encode it into MP3 or so.
Lossy compression
- MP3 (usually Mpeg I layer 3; sometimes Mpeg I Layer 2 or 1 or even Mpeg II) is the most widespread format of storing audio data on computers nowadays.
Main advantages: very widespread; quite a good quality/size ratio; could be used in many mobile devices; MP3 players exist for almost any OS and platform.
Main disadvantages: sound quality (encoding and decoding) depends on the encoder/decoder used; poor tagging system (even ID3V2), some legal stuff.
- OGG Vorbis is a relatively new open source sound format, which is becoming even more popular day by day.
Main advantages: better than MP3 in quality/size ratio; open source (free!!!); Unicode for tags; "upgradability".
Main disadvantages: still not so popular as MP3, but OGG players exist for most of the modern OSs; not supported by most hardware players (yet).
- Windows Media Audio. WMA is a closed format by Microsoft. It was developed as an alternative to MP3, but with data protection.
Main advantages: great quality/size ratio, free encoders are built into Windows.
Main disadvantages: "data protection", which brings an average user more problems than advantages; not as widespread as MP3 or OGG and has much less chances for this; does not support high bitrates.
- Real Audio is considered a good solution for transferring sound through the net in real time, but modern streaming audio formats also allow this. Storing your home musical collection in RA is not a good idea at all: MP3/WMA and OGG are much better for this.
Main advantages: quite popular for transferring music via Internet in real time (Internet radio).
Main disadvantages: relatively low quality/size ratio.
- MP3 Pro by Thomson doesn't seem to replace MP3 at all. As there are no good encoders (the ones available for free only support low bitrates with the quality near MP3-128) and players (MP3Pro plugin for Winamp is buggy and has a lack of features), and no high bitrate support, it could only replace MP3 for transferring files through Internet. From the other side, some experts advise to use WMA instead.
Main advantages: High quality/size ratio; backward compatibility with MP3 (MP3Pro files can still be played by ordinary MP3 players with some losses of quality).
Main disadvantages: there are not too many popular codecs; no high bitrates support (am I wrong?); not too much players.
- There are much more audio formats, which are used nowadays, but they are not as popular as the ones above. AAC, VQF, LQT and some even less known ones are supported mainly by fans or a small number of software/musical companies.
How to encode
MP3
- As the quality of an MP3 file greatly depends on the encoder used, you should select it very carefully. The best known encoding engines are Fraunhofer, LAME, Xing, Blade. The first two are considered the best, but Fraunhofer encoder is a commercial product. Xing is also very popular, but produces files with lower quality (it works faster, though).
- LAME is possibly the best solution for home use. This freeware MP3 encoder with excellent sound quality is the best way to create your own MP3s. The latest versions include ACM codec, command line encoder and the encoding library.
- If you're not experienced enough or just don't like to use command line tools, you might use so-called frontends, special programs, which simplify the use of the encoder. WinLAME is a great freeware tool designed for this aim. A GUI interface is easier to use for most people. It supports all the LAME features, unlike many other programs of the same kind.
- DrTag is a great MP3 tagging program. The only disadvantage is that it's shareware, so you need to pay for its use. Or not. ;)
OGG
- Use Oggenc, if you are experienced enough or just need a command line encoder.
- Oggdrop is a simple and easy to use encoding program for beginners.
- OggdropXP is a bit more complicated, but allows you to adjust encoding settings more carefully.
- WinLAME could work with OGG too.
- Winvorbis is a great program to encode your wave files into OGG and work with their Tags.
WMA
- WMA Encoders are usually built into Windows, but you could use any third-party software.
Sound quality: Loseless compression
These formats don't affect the quality in any way. The compression ratio depends on the format and doesn't exceed 1:2 on most files.
MP3
- MP3 128Kbps, Joint Stereo is the most popular format for the music in Internet. The sound quality is good enough to hear the melody, but still far from "CD quality".
- Use ABR instead of CBR or ABR for encoding. This will increase the sound quality and decrease file size.
- LAME alt-normal preset is a good solution for many situations. The average bitrate is about 192, and the sound quality is excellent.
- Try to use "quality" optimization instead of "speed". You would lose time, but gain better sound.
- You could try to get "extreme" quality at a bitrate of 256 or even 320 Kbps, but remember that you won't be able to hear any difference between two files with these bitrates in most cases. You'll need expensive professional equipment for that (and a good ear, for sure!). The more, a file with a bitrate of 192 kbps will have "CD quality" on most of computer speakers.
OGG
- A bitrate of 128 kbps gives better sound than MP3-128 kbps.
- 160Kbps could be a good solution for home use and even transferring files via the Net.
- Unlike MP3, OGG supports very high bitrates (OggDropXP can encode files as a bitrate of 500 Kbps). Just remember that the bitrate of an uncompressed audio file with CD quality (44KHz, 16 bit, stereo) is 720 ;)
WMA
- At a bitrate of 128 Kbps this codec gives very good results. It could be a good solution for transferring the files on the net.
- Even WMA-96Kbps files sound good enough, while MP3 files with the same bitrate have much more noticeable artifacts.
- Don't use low bitrates for storing your music until file size is really critical (portable hardware players or so).
Players
- Winamp is the most popular Windows audio player. Supports most of the modern sound formats, thanks to plugins. The quality of the sound could also be increased by the use of plugins (using mpg123 library instead of Nitrane engine).
- WMP (Windows media player). Its only advantage is that it comes with Windows.
- Apollo is considered one of the best MP3 players. The quality of the sound is great, the quality of the interface could be better.
- Select an MP3 player depending on the codec used. If the codec is provided by Xing, then don't expect good results. If it's made by Fraunhofer, then it's OK.
Tagging
- When organizing your MP3 collection remember that an MP3 file could contain two kinds of ID3 Tags: v1 and v2. Tags versions 1 have some limitation on the length of each field and so on. By contrast, Id3V2 tags don't have these limits and could contain much more information. Synchronize your tags.
- DrTag is one of the best ways to organize your music. This small shareware tool has a very large set of functions.
- Tag is a small command line utility for filling tags in your MP3, OGG, etc. files, renaming them and so on... There's also a GUI frontend.
- WinVorbis would also help you keep your OGG files in order.
Organizing your library
- Try to keep your musical files in order: tag editing and file renaming programs are made exactly for this.
- One possible solution could be: Artist (dir)Album (dir)Artist-Track-Title.extension.
- Use players which work with the local music database, like WinAMP3, Music Match Jukebox, Sonic Foundry Siren and so on.
Greets and respects: first of all to Fiorela Agusti; Adok and all the international Hugi team; members of Deviantart, 1001winampskins.com and all other skinning/design communities; all the musicians around the world; personally to Iliks for sharing his experience in music.