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Kirk,

Thanks for the excellent article. A good tutorial for all of us.

Great article - although you shouldn't need to tell audiophiles to set the output to 96kHz, because they'll realise straight away when they're not hearing all those ultrasonic frequencies... Right? ;-)

jowie, on 06 April 2012 - 08:46 AM, said:

That sets the sample rate (number of samples per second), not the ceiling for frequencies. Nice try, though.

abitterredpill, on 06 April 2012 - 09:50 AM, said:

Actually, the sample rate does determine the frequency ceiling. The highest frequency that can be represented in an uncompressed digital audio file is always exactly half of the sample rate. This is called the Nyquist Frequency. Standard CDs at 44.1kHz can represent a maximum frequenecy within their audio content of 22.05 kHz, a bit higher than the highest frequenecies that most people can hear. That's why 44.1kHz was chosen for CDs standard sample rate. Some people disagree with that though, and point to ideas such as higher frequencies combining in ways that are audible in lower frequenecies, but this sort of stuff is endless argued over by audiphiles, and I've never heard anything really definitive on it.

"You can’t improve the quality of a track you’ve already ripped."

I'll have to disagree. A few of my songs were so bad that deleting them was a major improvement!

Good article but the headline led me to think this would have more specific details on determining the best settings for music files instead of combining libraries. For example, I save my music as dual channel mono (same audio in the left and right) because I'm deaf in 1 ear. Stereo only gives the illusion of which direction a sound comes from. It doesn't exist in the real world since sound sources (voice, musical instrument) come from only 1 point.

Dotkhan, on 06 April 2012 - 12:45 PM, said:

Hmm, that's odd. Of course "stereo" exists in the real world, at least if both your ears can hear. The stereo sensation exists because of our ears. It is subjective.

First, no sound exists in a straight line like a laser beam; all sounds resonate in the space around them. Second, even a piano is a number of sounds coming from different points in the piano; the different strings. And, any ensemble of musicians have sounds coming from different locations.

As for the best settings for you, double-mono does make sense, but you could save space and just use regular mono; it would have the same effect. Regarding bit rates, the only thing you can do is try and see what is best for you, with the understand that higher bit rates take up more space, meaning you can have less music on an iPod or computer. Very few people will find a difference between 256 kbps stereo and original CDs; if you rip in mono, you can use 128 kbps.

This post has been edited by kirkmc: 07 April 2012 - 01:51 AM

Any Apple lossless apps for video? Have had little success.

<a href="http://www.peernet.com/document-conversion-service/">document converter</a> must always use this algo only.