26
votes
Accepted
Does the .wav file created from a .mp3 file have better quality than the .mp3 file itself?
A WAV file has the potential to hold "more" or "better" data than an mp3. WAVs employ no compression, no loss; they are as close to an exact replica as it is possible to get.
An mp3 employs lossy ...
- 8,560
8
votes
Does the .wav file created from a .mp3 file have better quality than the .mp3 file itself?
No. When you convert a file from .mp3 to .wav, no new information is added: there is no way to regenerate the information that was lost when you created the mp3. All the extra data in the .wav file is ...
- 1,578
5
votes
Does the .wav file created from a .mp3 file have better quality than the .mp3 file itself?
MP3 is the 'colloquial' name for "MPEG 1 Layer 3" audio encoding. The purpose of mp3 encoding is to reduce the overall size of an audio data stream whilst maintaining an acceptable level of listening ...
- 8,835
4
votes
Accepted
Can a MP3 file contain video frames?
Mp3 is audio only. The file extension can be virtually anything; if it's recognized as an extension known by Windows the associated program will be used to open it. The program will usually then read ...
- 466
4
votes
Does the .wav file created from a .mp3 file have better quality than the .mp3 file itself?
In order to make sound, your computer must drive the speaker with a time-varying voltage. In order to create the time-varying voltage, the computer must send a sequence of numbers to a Digital-to-...
- 141
4
votes
Why do MP3 files have a sample rate? (When they are just composed of sine waves)
Digital sound files are not made up of sine waves - You may be thinking of FM or West Coast synthesis where sine waves are used to modulate other sine waves to generate more complex waveforms.
You ...
- 839
3
votes
Accepted
What sample rates can an MP3 file have?
If this wikipedia page is to be believed, what you call mp3 and is actually a MPEG-1 audio layer 3 encoded audio file only supports three sample rates :
32 kHz
44.1 kHz
48 kHz
EDIT
As @PkP has ...
- 2,834
3
votes
How can I convert large audio file .aiff to mp3?
you could definitely use ffmpeg for this kind of job.
$ ffmpeg -i path/to/your_input.aiff path/to/the_converted_file.mp3
ffmpeg is a huge framework dedicated to multimedia encoding.
Once installed ...
- 1,103
3
votes
LAME: Why is a lowpass filter used with --preset insane
This is an anti-aliasing filter. The --preset insane settings must allow aliasing to become apparent.
Your iPhone can't reproduce the frequencies the filter is applied to anyway, and if it could, you ...
- 2,526
3
votes
What makes low quality speakers become distorted when at high volume?
There are a number of factors involved here but mainly frequency response, transient response, signal to noise ratio (S/N) and total harmonic distortion (THD).
Frequency response is largely dependent ...
- 1,573
3
votes
alternative to mp3
During the editing & collaboration phase, it's good to avoid lossy formats if you can.
You might want to try FLAC, a lossless format that compresses audio files to about half the size of WAV. ...
- 31
3
votes
mp3 spectral analysis blue above 16 khz
Everybody seems to have this obsession with looking at pictures of sound. You can't tell what something sounds like by looking at a picture of it, the same as looking at a picture of food doesn't tell ...
- 8,560
3
votes
Accepted
How to interpret this PCM data?
Your data have relation neither to bitrate, nor to frequencies. The name samples[] suggests that they are samples, i.e. amplitude values in particular time points:
These time points ...
- 431
2
votes
How to ensure uniform sound levels in multiple WAV files?
You are talking about perceived loudness. This is quite unlike peak level. What you can do is measure the perceived loudness for all your songs and then adjust the gain accordingly. The best way ...
- 104
2
votes
Opus vs MP3 (Size & Quality Comparison)
Assuming your ripping from lossless source to Opus/MP3, Opus is definitely superior sound quality as this is shown in listening tests from Hydrogenaudio website.
as a general rule... Opus/AAC(standard ...
- 29
2
votes
How to add meta info to mp3/wav file MAC OSX?
I've read lots of blogs where people give advice on adding metadata to WAV files. Most of it doesn't work. iTunes is useless for adding metadata to WAV or AIFF files, because it only sticks to the ...
- 21
2
votes
How to convert a stereo MP3 to mono MP3
On Linux systems like Ubuntu, you can use ffmpeg:
ffmpeg -i input.mp3 -c:a libmp3lame -q:a 2 -ac 1 output.mp3
where:
-c:a libmp3lame: The audio codec to use
-q:a 2: The audio quality (bitrate), see ...
- 171
2
votes
Accepted
Why are levels so different on popular music tracks I open in my wav editor?
Basically, you're right with all your points.
The level between different albums can indeed be dramatically different, depending on how agressively it was mastered. Records from the early days of CDs ...
- 6,066
2
votes
MP3 and bitrate
Your assumption that bitrate = bitdepth * channels * samplerate is true for raw PCM encoded audio. It is not true for bitrate reduction encodings, be it lossless (as flac) or lossy (as mp3).
The ...
- 2,834
2
votes
MP3 Psychoacoustic Cut-off Frequencies for Low-Bitrate Presets
Here is a tentative answer based on the 192kHz 24-bit Japanese female speech sample:
First I generate the test files from the sample file, sample02.wav:
for br in 8 16 24 32 40 48 56 64 80; do
...
- 131
2
votes
What makes low quality speakers become distorted when at high volume?
Schizomorph makes a solid answer for all the technical details, but I'm going to break it down more basically.
Sound consists of pressure changes.
A speaker makes sound by moving a diaphragm that ...
- 8,162
2
votes
alternative to mp3
While lossless compression like FLAC would solve your storage space issue, it is a heavy load on your CPU, so you may run into problems if your machine is at at all old.
The usual recommended ...
- 5,973
2
votes
Do Opus And AAC Use Artistic License To Improve Sound Quality By Sacrificing Accuracy?
You can read up on how the Opus codec works here: http://opus-codec.org/
Opus is entirely open-source, so you can even read the source-code to determine how it works.
Here is a paper on how MP3 and ...
- 8,835
2
votes
What software is best at ripping multi-CD audiobooks?
I used portable 'MarkAble' + installed legacy ver. 12 iTunes, with the optical drive added to 'device' list in VBox, on WinXP-Pro.
MarkAble won't work past iTunes v12, and has been discontinued. I ...
- 21
2
votes
Does the .wav file created from a .mp3 file have better quality than the .mp3 file itself?
You cannot get detail from nothing
Even though WAV files can hold more detailed sound, that doesn't mean they always do. Converting from MP3 to WAV would be one such scenario, the converter cannot ...
- 121
2
votes
Subliminal messages in MP3
that claims to have embedded in them messages at a frequency that
people cannot hear
That's an odd claim to make. Subliminal messages can be done in video: the theory is that you can show a message ...
- 1,578
2
votes
What defines loudness of mp3 in a file?
Let’s take a CD audio audio stream. It is a stream of 16 bits samples : in an other word, a stream of numbers between -32768 and +32767. On audacity, each number is matched with a number between -1 ...
- 627
2
votes
Accepted
Is there any easy and simple way to reduce the size of MP3 files?
No, there is no way.
Compression via mp3 removes frequencies, people tend „not to hear“. This reduces the amount of data to be stored. Compared to raw data (.wav) mp3 are considerably smaller.
If you ...
- 340
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible