Put All Audio Questions Here

No reason really. -V 0 (aka --preset extreme) will go to 320kbps when the audio is suitably complex, not decreasing percieved quality at all. LAME does a very good job with this, which is why rock albums encode at >280kbps and Sega Genesis VGM rips encode <128kbps with -v 0.
If you want anything sounding better than 320kbps LAME mp3s, go with AAC, Musepack, Ogg Vorbis at 256kbps or just go lossless.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by soniclover

So, wouldn't having a 320 CBR for a less complex song hurt it's quality?

No it'd just waste space. Encoding a song with 5 minutes of silence (like bonus tracks on CDs) would be an utter waste, as those silent frames would be perfectly encoded at 32kbps.
It'd be like encoding a 8000Hz 8bit Mono file at 160kbps, which is even above the lossless bitrate, Shure, you'd have the best representation of the original audio, but you could do 99.99% as well with -V 0 or similar preset.

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Originally Posted by soniclover

Thanks for all of the help guys. I'm sorry for pestering you all so much will all of my questions but I've had some of these questions for a while. :juggler:

I'm glad you guys were nice enough help me.

I'm using a Batch Processor on Goldwave to take all of my albums and songs in CBR and convert them to VBR. What I'm wondering though is, how is it possible to actually convert a song from CBR to VBR? I though Birate is permanent and that no program can change it when it's ripped in CBR.

Another question is, would it have the same quality as directly ripping a song from the actually CD in VBR?

In any case, it's always best to rip the VBR mp3 from the source material, and not the CBR mp3. The only reason I could see to convert an mp3 from CBR to VBR is to lower the bitrate (like 320kbps to -V 2), which has its purposes, or if you have something like Ogg Vorbis files you can't play on a certain media player.
If you must convert CBR mp3s to VBR, I do believe LAME should be able to accept the mp3 without question. Just use whatever VBR preset you want and LAME will re-encode the file. There's no point in going for a higher bitrate BTW, so if you wanted 128kbps CBR mp3s to sound like 192kbps VBR mp3s, it's not going to happen. Like I've said, re-rip the CD tracks and keep as lossless copy if you can, then re-rip the tracks to mp3. THIS is the reason many people use lossless, so they can re-encode when it proves advantageous without having to do the nasty lossy to lossy process of transcoding.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Originally Posted by Slogra

You might wanna take a look at Mp3packer. It seems convert 320kbps to smaller vbr files without loss. I never tried it myself though.

Unlikely. If you transcode 320kbps files to -V 5 (~130kbps VBR), you won't really hear any differences unless you have extremely good hearing.

I was speaking idiomatically.

Originally Posted by Arucard

Hi there, i don't know if this is the right place to ask this but here goes, i wanted to know the link to a website that had the directsound resampling plugin for winamp. These forums even had a guide on how to improve quality in winamp and etc. i already grabbed shibatch but i wanted the ssrc for winamp version 2.2.6 if not mistaken. thanks everyone hope someone can help.

I do believe shibatch's directsound plugin inlcludes SSRC, I don't use WinAmp anymore, so I can't confirm this.

How ya doing, buddy?

Has anyone made a good Spc plugin for foobar2000 yet? The OpenSPC is a real piece of shit, it has so many missing sounds. If I could find something that could do as well as SNESAmp, I could give the Winamp Wrapper plugin the boot.

FELIPE NO

Originally Posted by ArrowHead

I use GEP (Game Emu Player). It's very accurate. It will not make your SPC's sound super fake and sparkly like Winamp's SPC plugins tend to.

Is there any way to disable (or override) the other formats GEP supports? I like foo_vgm much more than GEP's VGM.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

Plus they take up a lot less space. VGM rips are (at their largest) only 4MB, while a 128kbps MP3 of one of the songs could be bigger than that. Also VGM, SPC from what I've noticed are the smallest music files I've seen able to playback 96kHz music.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

I may have asked this question before, but I was wondering if there is a way to save streaming MP3/OGG/AAC streams directly to the HDD without any transcoding.
I'm getting into streaming radio again and would love to be able to save streams onto disk.

How ya doing, buddy?

Originally Posted by soniclover

What is the advantage of having a playlist? Does it primarily making playing the mp3's faster? How does it affect mp3 players (like what would be the difference of playing in album without a playlist and one with one).

None really, it's just easier to open a whole album by clicking on one file as opposed to selecting all of them individually (or roping them as is the common method of selecting multiple files with a mouse). It also is very handy for preserving a play order that the filenames wouldn't permit a (such as in Project2612 rips, where the files have no trackname, and thus the m3u playlists preserve the order they should be played back in).
Also (I haven't dabbled in this yet), it's possible to store the metadata of a music file without altering it by storing the information in the playlist. Most newer (meaning post m3u) playlist formats support this natively, while m3u playlists need the player to be able to read or write the metadata to the m3u file.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Originally Posted by Blue_Kirby2

Kind of a dumb question, but how would I merge two tracks together? I'm working with DSPs and I want to combine the left channel file and the right channel file into one file. Thanks for any help.

First get Audacity 1.2.3 or newer:

Originally Posted by Excerpt from My Kick Ass Ratchet & Clank Ripping Guide

To make a stereo wav file from two mono files (using Audacity):
Make sure that the Project Rate (as indicated in the lower left corner of the window reads 36000. To change the project rate, left click on the sample rate indicated, a menu should appear, select "Other..." at the bottom of the selection. Clear whatever value is currently present and enter 36000. As long as you keep editing Ratchet: Deadlocked music you'll only need to change this value once every time you run Audacity.
1. Run Audacity
2. Select "Project" -> "Import Audio" [Ctrl] + [I]
a. Select the file that is the left channel audio
3. On the imported wav file you should see a X to close the wav file, just to the right it should have the filename and a dropdown arrow, click that arrow and select "Left Channel"
4. Import the right channel audio file
5. Now follow step 3 for the right audio file, except select "Right Channel" in the dropdown menu
6. Select "File" -> "Export As WAV..." and save the file where ever you like
7. Rinse and repeat until you have done this with all of the Ratchet: Deadlocked music

Just ignore all sample rate information and Ratchet & Clank references.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Originally Posted by Expertgamer

That's the problem, I can't.

I know it sounds weird but I can't record any music!

Does it refuse, or is the recording silent? If the latter is the case, make sure you windows volume meters are around 50% for Mic and Line In.

How ya doing, buddy?

Originally Posted by Unas

A friend of mine recorded a gig on his mp3 player, the player in question is a Venture. This company seems unheard of, the item cost 160 euro or something but anyway nevermind that.

The tracks are .WAV files but when I attempt to play them they are called unsupported format, the format is invalid on my psp aswell. They play grand on the actual mp3 player but they don't seem to play elsewhere at all. Anyone any thoughts on how this is happening, know of any codec or software which could help? Cheers in advance

They sound like mp3s in a WAV format. Try renaming the wav files to mp3 and see if that works.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Originally Posted by starki18

Thanks a lot!!!

I also have 2 two questions:

1) How can I reduce quality of the song? I decompressed using Monkey's Audio, but this song has 700 mgb, so I want to reduce it..
2) Which program is the best (and easiest) for cutting songs and separate it on a few parts?

Thanks!

Just use the lossy codec of your choice (such as LAME mp3) and encode the file. If you want to make it easy, use foobar2000 and it'll load the CUE file and make it easy to split it into individual mp3s.

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Originally Posted by Angry Willow

OK, so here's the deal. I like to record music that I write, but it all sounds extremely soft, although the balance and equalization are fine. I have to turn the volume all the way up on my computer to hear my songs. Would MP3Gain or ReplayGain solve this problem, or will that just give me clipping?

ReplayGain has a built-in mechanism, not only to prevent clipping but to remove clipping already in the waveform. So no matter how much +dB ReplayGain gives you, it shouldn't have the file clip, it should in fact peak perfectly at ~1.000000.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

Originally Posted by Blue_Kirby2

I'm pretty certain I know the answer to this already, but I'd just like to be 100% sure - if I was to decode an APE file to WAV, and then encode to mp3, is there any loss of quality in doing so? Somebody sent me a CD rip last night that was compressed all into a single APE file, and this is the first time I've attempted to decode + encode it to mp3.

If you mean is there any quality loss between APE and WAV, then there should be no loss in quality. Of course mp3, using lossy compression will have some quality loss; but (provided the APE files are not corrupted), CD -> APE -> WAV -> mp3 should be the same as CD -> mp3.

BTW: If there's a single APE file for the whole CD-rip, be aware that you'll probably need to open a CUE sheet to properly find the track positions for the mp3s to split properly. foobar2000 could open the CUE sheet and even do a straight APE -> mp3 conversion without too much hassle.

Jam it back in, in the dark.