Re: OT: sound enhancement for mp3 music

Hi!

> Any comments?

The *best* thing to have is a good quality MP3 encoder. MP3
compression is "lossy"...that is to say that bits and pieces of the
original piece of music you are compressing into MP3 format are thrown
away. It is up to the compressor what is thrown away, but the idea is
to only throw away things that you shouldn't miss when listening.
Differing MP3 encoders have different ideas as to what can be thrown
away without you noticing. What they can get away with depends upon
your ears, the speakers you have and the sound card you have, but
these factors are all secondary.

The last I knew, LAME did a pretty good job of encoding to MP3 format,
although iTunes seems to have a pretty good encoder as well.

If you cannot or do not want to get a different MP3 encoder, try
increasing the bit rate used during encoding. 128 is the typical
setting, with 160 or 192 resulting in better quality encoding since
less is thrown away. This will result in better sound quality at the
expense of larger files. You can go up to at least 320kbp/s with most
encoders.

Variable bit rate encoding is supposed to lower the bit rate when
lower quality encoding wouldn't be noticed, and turn it back up again
when a higher bit rate would be needed. This isn't always perfect, and
it's not compatible with all the players out there, so use a constant
bit rate encoding method if you have a choice.

If you have the options to do so, make sure that you are using digital
audio extraction and that error correction is turned on. It's been my
experience just about every CD-ROM drive really should have error
correction turned on, otherwise your MP3 files may contain skips,
pops, or clicks.

You can try to enhance the sound after the fact, but restoring
something that wasn't there to begin with is an iffy and error prone
process at best.

Some sound cards do better than others with regard to background
noise, and some speakers are quieter than others. Everything else is
secondary to using a good encoder and the bit rate you want to start
out with.

Hi!

> Thanks William. If I read your post correctly (and an excellent one
> too), it dealt with what I use to make the mp3s

Yes, that is what I was talking about. Since you already have the
MP3s, you can't do much about the quality or method by which they were
encoded.

> and just want to play them back as natural sounding as possible.
> Of course "natural" to my ears may be different to another
> person's ears. I guess I need a "good" equalizer.

A simple equalizer might help, and I hadn't thought of that
possibility. Most MP3 players do include one in some form or another,
so you might try that and see what you get.

If you can't get the speakers to sound like you think they should, I
would recommend returning them and shopping around for speakers in a
place where you can try them out. Perhaps the speakers you have just
aren't the best for your particular idea of what the music should
sound like. I would definitely do that before spending money on audio
enhancement software.

William