Oct 21 2008
Let’s Talk MP3’s and quality
Hey all! It’s been a while (and a hell of a day job ride lol) since I last blogged about anything useful to the home recorders out there, so while I’m awaiting feedback on a mix ‘n master job I’m doing (some rockin’ stuff by the way!), I thought I’d talk about MP3 quality. And point 1 is…MP3 QUALITY SUCKS!!!!
Most people fairly new to recording know this to be a fact. Why? Because they record away, mix away till happy, then mix a tune down to an 192K MP3 and things become lifeless. It sounded a lot better when they mixed it, they assure me…and they are correct! I preach great acoustics and monitoring, the best tone you can get going in, and attention to detail. And I get “why? everything is gonna get mixed down to an MP3 anway” back all the time.
Pull up an MP3 of a commercial song in iTunes. Sounds pretty good…one might say commercial even! Maybe you excuse that good sound because of the professionals who worked on it, with great precision, equipment and knowledge. You’d be right. You might think though, you sounded close to as good when you were mixing your last tune though. So why do our tunes come out like pancakes in an MP3?
Some data points:
- MP3’s don’t sound as good as an uncompressed WAV
-The lower the bit rate the crappier the sound
- Despite that there are some damn nice sounding MP3’s, even at 128K sometimes
The answer is simple. That great sounding MP3, imagine how good it sounded before it became an MP3. Picture sitting behind the mastering engineer as he printed the final copy. It must have sounded absolutely amazing. Then somebody compressed the heck out of it into an MP3 and it went from “amazing” to “great sounding”. Just like your “pretty good” went to “flat Stanley” in the same conversion.
MP3’s take lots of shortcuts to get smaller, and the lower the bitrate the more shortcuts. If you want your songs to sound better, convert them to 320K MP3’s instead of 192K. That’s the max you’ll get out of an MP3 (I’m not gonna mess with explaining CBR vs. VBR for simplicity’s sake). But really, really really, really really really, the best way to get there is to start with a great sounding track instead of a pretty good one. That’s where the difference is. All that attention to detail and experience is even more important for an MP3 world!
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