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 ...
- 8,141
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 ...
- 1,568
6
votes
Accepted
Are compressed audio files converted to raw pcm by audio players?
Usually, an application that plays encoded files (be it audio or video) will need to decode that file to a format that the target interface (be it a video or audio interface) can output on a standard ...
- 2,794
5
votes
Opus vs MP3 (Size & Quality Comparison)
Opus is a much newer, state of the art technology than MP3. Any time you encode audio into MP3 or Opus, you never get a perfect, exact copy of the original file. There is always some distortion added ...
- 131
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 ...
- 8,735
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 ...
- 829
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 ...
- 2,451
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 ...
- 1,093
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 ...
- 2,794
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 ...
- 1,563
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 ...
- 8,141
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 ...
- 415
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
Why do mp3 files have a time delay when compared to wav files?
It has to do with the MP3 codec algorithm. I don't know the exact science behind it but it's something you have to deal with when using MP3's because it can't be prevented.
- 303
2
votes
Accepted
Is it possible to mix MP3 Files into an audio mix a long mp3 without degredation?
There are programs that can split and concatenate MP3s without re-encoding. So one thing you could do is to split a few seconds off every MP3 at the beginning and end, apply your cross-fades to them (...
2
votes
Is it possible to mix MP3 Files into an audio mix a long mp3 without degredation?
To my knowledge, this is not possible. To add and crossfade audio data requires to decode the mp3 binary stream to pcm, then re-encode to mp3 the resulting pcm stream if you want an mp3 output.
As ...
- 2,794
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
Splitting podcasts on the introductory jingle
I will answer on the assumption that the solution:
can be given for only one file: you will know how to apply it to a bunch of files using any scripting language,
has not to be sample-wise: a ...
- 416
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
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 ...
- 6,056
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 ...
- 2,794
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 ...
- 8,132
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 ...
- 5,957
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible