[MacMan12]

Which will provide the best audio quality for listening on a portable player that can play both CDs and mp3s?

1. Leave the mp3s as is (320kbs) and burn a mp3 disk for the player.

2. Use Toast (or some better program?) to burn a standard audio CD.


Thank you

[k_munic]

Originally posted by MacMan12:
Which will provide the best audio quality for listening on a portable player that can play both CDs and mp3s?

1. Leave the mp3s as is (320kbs) and burn a mp3 disk for the player.

2. Use Toast (or some better program?) to burn a standard audio CD.


Thank you

what is your "raw" material? a cd? - put THAT in your portable (or, just toast a copy of it),
is it mp3s in iTunes? - ok, mp3 with 320kbs is - from my point of view - a digital overkill. especially on a portable - hey, where are you listening to your music, in a studio ?

many (not all!) audiohils say, mp3 with 160kbs is enough...-. so, producing a mp3 cd would be enough. but DON'T re-convert your mp3s from 320 to 160!! never ever compress compressed material!!

if your raw footage is mp3, a conversion back into aiff (to make a "audio" cd) means, you loose quality!

so, to make scheme:
mp3 >> mp3
audio cd >> audio cd

wow, this was difficult to explain

[MacMan12]

The "raw" file is a 320 mp3 on my mac. I know that this is pretty high for an encoding bitrate (I enjoy music, but I'm not really an audiophile) but it's a "sync" brainwave (entrainment/meditation) file. There was some discussion about whether the lossy/psychoacoustic nature of the mp3 compression might remove some elements that while not conciously perceived were necessary for the function.

So I was wondering should I rely on the mp3 decoder built into the portable player (possibly lower quality?) or convert it into an AIFF file on the mac (converting it to a file type that has a longer history of refinement in terms of its implemetation in portable electronics.)

But it seems that you're saying that any type of re-encoding is going to negatively impact the recording. Correct?

[k_munic]

Originally posted by MacMan12:
The "raw" file is a 320 mp3 on my mac. I know that this is pretty high for an encoding bitrate (I enjoy music, but I'm not really an audiophile) but it's a "sync" brainwave (entrainment/meditation) file. There was some discussion about whether the lossy/psychoacoustic nature of the mp3 compression might remove some elements that while not conciously perceived were necessary for the function.

So I was wondering should I rely on the mp3 decoder built into the portable player (possibly lower quality?) or convert it into an AIFF file on the mac (converting it to a file type that has a longer history of refinement in terms of its implemetation in portable electronics.)

But it seems that you're saying that any type of re-encoding is going to negatively impact the recording. Correct?

yes, exactly - but we are fishing in dark water: on a cd, there just a few gazillion pits; some electronics has to transfer this datastream of 0s and 1s into sound - so, aiff or mp3 doesn't matter in the beginning. but you are totally right, mp3 is a bit tricky:

aiff tries to convert a analog singal into a stream of 0&1; the quality depends on, how often this analysis is taken; standard is 44,1KHz, which means, every second of your music is splitted into 44100 chunk every second (wow!)

for mp3, the clever guys at frauenhofer institute found out, that many sounds are not heard - welcome to the wonderful world of psychoacoustics! to give a very dump example (all my example are dump): a whole orchestra makes a beethoven-alike "tadaa!" - normally, you wouldn't recognize the small violine in the background.
mp3 was invented for transfering music over a lowband iNet connection - loss of deatils was intended!… for the promise of smaller file size… "hey, forget details - all i wanna know, is it brittney spears or metallica!"

so, if you re-convert a mp3 file into aiff, there is no way to bring back these lost elements!

for your project: use the very high bitrate mp3s and give your mp3player a try

happy brainwaveriding

PS: afaik, i have never heard of a test of different mp3 decoding chips… would be interesting, if there is any diference

[MacMan12]

Thanks for your help. I'll give the mp3 route a try.

Schoenen Dank.