Re: MP3 Encoding - Tags???

["Ian Lowe" <ian@xxxxxxx>]

> Very nice Ian!!

To be honest, the biggest thing is that it changes the way you listen to
music, we would be totally lost without the MP3 archive being there. Our CD
collection is now just:

a) an annoying pile of plastic that needs to be stored somewhere
b) a bulky method of getting the music home
c) something that needs to be dusted
d) a grudging solution to portable music (less now we have a portable MP3
discman)

It's great to be able to randomly play tracks from nearly 500 albums, and
pooling nearly a dozen people's collections produces a very
"eclectic" mix.
We have everything from Gershwin to Marilyn Manson, from Abba to
Metallica....

> This is what I am using at the moment!

Yay! another convert. (Peter and Phil, your copy is on it's way, but then
you probably know that by now as you stare in disbelief at the time it
takes
to download one message!)

> Yep...this is a must.  Thanks for the suggestions.  How do you change
> between the settings for ordinary and compelations?

I haven't found a good way, so my wife wrote a little doo-daa in VB for me.
(She is a coder to trade)

>>I personally use 128kbps Joint Stereo at 44KHz for everything.
> I have noticed a difference on downloads and now mainly use 192kbps.

Some people can tell. I ride a motorbike, so I can't :) to be honest,
arstechnica did a comparison with a hi-res digital scope and found the
waveforms produced by winamp playing a 192 and 128 (and a 160 and a 256)
version of "sweet child of mine", and found that the only area of
the
waveform which was perceptively different was the region from 19Khz-24Khz,
which is supposed to be outwith the MPEG envelope anyway!

Ever been bitten by a wolf on a cold winter's night there Mark? :)

>Whats the deal with Joint Stereo?

If you encode straight stereo, then the left and right streams are treated
as seperate entities within the file, in that a low bandwidth left channel
can't provide more bandwidth for an active right, so the overall
compression
ratio isn't so good. Joint Stereo allows sideways borrowing of bandwidth
between channels as well as forward/back within the stream, which results
in
smaller files.

Also, Joint Stereo uses the uses the inability of the mind to spatially
seperate low frequencies, to save encoding information in two seperate
channels which the brain can't tell came from the left or right anyways....
In fact, I seem to recall that straight stereo presents problems in that if
the left and right version of the bass get slightly out of sync (which can
happen in a straight stereo encode, as there is no interchannel syncing)
then you get a bizzare echo effect.  I can only describe it as always
making
me think there's someone at the door, as if there was an extra noise that
wasn't part of the music.

Ian.



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