I'm new to ripping MP3 files and have a bunch of questions based on my first experiences. Anyone who cares to can answer onlist or in private email, and I'm perfectly happy to have URL pointers to information on this, as opposed to patient explanations.
Anyway, I was wondering if someone on the list had some understanding of MP3 files and could tell me why I'm having intermittent problems with some files I created skipping. The skips do not occur in the same places each time and whene I rewind, they never skip the second time. Is there something wrong with the files themselves or is my computer causing a problem somehow? It doesn't appear to me to be related to other activity on the computer (I've watched the CPU activity and there is no spike just where there's a dropout). And someone else has reported that there are dropouts when she downloaded the MP3s. Anyone have an idea what's going on here? The MP3s in quesiton are at: http://www.bway.net/~dfenton/Collegium/HimmelUndErde/ (forgive the flaws of our performances -- we are musicologists, not professional musicians) One piece has had it happen just before the end twice when I was listening to it. That piece is the third one down from the top, and the dropouts have happened on the word "plötzlich" in the last 15 or 20 seconds of the MP3. But when you rewind, there's no dropout. Just playing it back myself, I found no dropout playing from near the end, but if I played from the beginning, when it got to the end, it dropped out at exactly the same place. Both the person who reported this to me and I are using Quicktime to play MP3s. And it's not a streaming issue, as the problem occurs whether I'm listening to the copies from the website (which download anyway, as Quicktime downloads in the background while playing what's already been downloaded) or from my local hard drive. I was doing other things wite the PC while I was ripping these, but I listened all the way through before uploading and heard the dropouts, but rewound and heard that the problems were intermittent. Any idea on this? I ripped them at 64bits, too, and was wondering if that's normal for this kind of situation (putting classical music on a web page). I also did 128bit and VBR recordings, and those latter two sound really lovely, as good as straight from the CD. The 64bit ones sound remarkably good, though a little harsh, and with just a tad of minor distortion at a few loud/high points (some distortion was in the original recording, which was done with two good mics, but recorded to a portable mini-disc player/recorder through a $1.98 mixing board). Can one use less than 64bits and get a decent trade-off of sound quality and size? I noticed that the 64bit ones are basically half the size of the 128bit ones, which doesn't entirely make sense to me, but, oh well (I wouldn't think a lossy compression standard like MPEG would have such a simply arithmetic relationship of file size to decreasing bit rate). And I did the VBR files with a range of 48 to 160bits, and those came out about 10% smaller than the 128bit files, not much of a savings, but with audible improvement in quality of the overall sound envelope. Can all MP3 players play VBR MP3s or not? And would doing VBR with a range of 36 to 96 (or some such range) get me a significantly better sound at about the same size as the straight 64bit? Or does it entirely depend on the type of music? Thanks in advance for any answers/suggestions/pointers that anyone can give! -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
