On 26 Sep 2005 at 4:09, Dennis W. Manasco wrote: > At 4:21 PM -0400 9/25/05, David W. Fenton wrote: > > >Does anyone hear any significant differences between the two? I can > >convince myself that I do, but it seems only psychological. > > I can hear a very minor difference, but shouldn't your reasoning > include your target audience?
This is a good point, but I'm not certain who my target audience is! > That is, shouldn't you consider whether or not they are the sort of > people who would be able to tell the difference, and whether they > would care in the context of their reason for listening to the > recordings? Well, I'm doing this for my Piano Quartets & Quintets web page, which I've recently completely revamped: http://dfenton.com/Midi/index.php (I'm still tweaking the layout there; the original version is still at http://dfenton.com/Midi/index.html) > Personally I like 160 kbps for importing CDs for my MP3 use, and > consider it a good trade-off. I have no idea how that setting would > affect files from your sound card, compared to 128 and 192. Well, I don't do anything with commercial CDs -- I only make MP3s of the recordigs of the groups I perform in myself, and I've found that 192K is noticeably better than either 128K or 160K. I've also experimented with variable bit rate, but found that I had to set it so high to get the same quality that I ended up with a file that was about the same size as the 192K version, so I just don't muck with it any longer (and there are, of course, some older MP3 players that don't handle VBR files well). > At 5:04 PM -0400 9/25/05, David W. Fenton wrote: > > >Of course, if I save the intermediate WAV file, I can generate MP3s > >of any quality at a later date, but I was hoping to skip that step so > >that I wouldn't have all those big WAV files littering my hard drive > >(which has a mere 2GBs of free space left). > > If it was me I'd litter a few CDs with the WAV files in case I needed > them at a later date, save the midi files to a data CD in case I > wanted to use them when synth technology had greatly improved, and > erase it all from my hard drive. Well, saving to CD is certainly an option, but I prefer to keep > By the way: If audio quality is really important to the people who > will be listening to these files, why not just send them audio CDs > with WAVs/AIFFs on them? Well, if I were sending files, I'd just record CDs made from the original WAV files, and no MP3s would be involved at all (i.e., no reduction of quality from the original), but this is for a web page, so file size matters a lot. For me on 2Mbps broadband, the different between 5MBs and 8MBs is insignificant, but for anyone with under 1Mbps (I assume dialup users will ignore the MP3s) it could be a problem. I think I'm just going to go with the 192K files and be done with it. I definitely like listening to them better than the 128K files, even though I can't quite put my finger on why they sound better. And, of course, for some listeners the artificiality of the not-good synthesized strings is going to be more of a stumbling block at either compression factor than the difference between 192K and 128K (though most people don't find the piano the least bit objectionable, though there are plenty of better piano samples out there; I just wish this one had better in-tune unisons). -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
