Song bit rates poll - Can you tell the difference?

[Adonis4000]

Hello! I am working on a project and I am collecting data. The question is:

Can people really tell the difference between lower bit rate files?

Please complete the poll to find out

 

Listen to the following files and chose what you think is correct, good luck

A - Rap God.mp3

B - Rap God.mp3

C - Rap God.mp3

A - Without Me.mp3

B - Without Me.mp3

C - Without Me.mp3

[Misanthrope]

Only 2 genres? Disgusting! 

Spoiler

Not really j/k

 

[mariushm]

Yes, people can tell the differences, but the music has to actually have content which would be lost when compressed at lower bitrates.

The samples you chose are crap, over processed songs with lows and highs cut and volume raised to sound nice to teens ... see Loudness wars on Youtube if you don't understand what I mean ... or see below: 

If you want to see how bitrates affect song quality, download a FLAC copy of an album or rip the tracks directly from an audio CD, from an album that's not processed to hell.

Load that file into a software like Adobe Audition and see the spectrum display .. view > spectral frequency display  in audition 3  ... you will see how when you encode to mp3 lower than 320kbps, the encoder cuts anything above some threshold like 16khz (because in theory older humans can no longer hear those sounds)

 

Download some Mike Oldfield FLAC albums, some Enya, music with lots of instruments, albums that aren't mastered for teen listeners , albums on which you can actually hear subtle notes. 

 

Here's some audio samples for you :  song 1 , song 2 , song 3  , song 4 , song 5 , song 6  (all between 20 and 40 MB , flac , lossless from cd or super cd)  (links will expire in a few hours)

 

Load them in a software like adobe audition before and after compression to mp3 and check spectral frequency and listen carefully to the tracks with some good headphones.

 

 

In addition, the proper way to do something like this would be to encode the samples to MP3 at those 3 different bitrates, then transcode each result to FLAC or some other lossless format. The transcode doesn't introduce additional loss of quality as FLAC is lossless.

This way you have a blind test, user can't tell the bitrate of the sound just by looking at the music player - right now I can just download all three samples and just by looking in foobar's status bar, I can see the bitrate.

 

 

 

[Dash Lambda]

Looks like this poll isn't for minors.

[AshleyAshes]

You should be converting your files BACK to FLAC or PCM for this.  If your test subject can use playback software that displays the bitrate, that spoils them as test subjects  So take your files, transcode them back to FLAC, that way your test subjects can't tell which file is which from simple file info.

 

If your subjects can already know what quality they are listening to before listening to it, than they are biased going in.

[Adonis4000]

19 hours ago, mariushm said:

s, people can tell the differences, but the music has to actually have content which would be lost when compressed at lower bitrates.

The samples you chose are crap, over processed songs with lows and highs cut and volume raised to sound nice to teens ... see Loudness wars on Youtube if you don't understand what I mean ... or see below: 

If you want to see how bitrates affect song quality, download a FLAC copy of an album or rip the tracks directly from an audio CD, from an album that's not processed to hell.

Load that file into a software like Adobe Audition and see the spectrum display .. view > spectral frequency display  in audition 3  ... you will see how when you encode to mp3 lower than 320kbps, the encoder cuts anything above some threshold like 16khz (because in theory older humans can no longer hear those sounds)

 

Download some Mike Oldfield FLAC albums, some Enya, music with lots of instruments, albums that aren't mastered for teen listeners , albums on which you can actually hear subtle notes. 

 

Here's some audio samples for you :  song 1 , song 2 , song 3  , song 4 , song 5 , song 6  (all between 20 and 40 MB , flac , lossless from cd or super cd)  (links will expire in a few hours)

 

Load them in a software like adobe audition before and after compression to mp3 and check spectral frequency and listen carefully to the tracks with some good headphones.

 

 

In addition, the proper way to do something like this would be to encode the samples to MP3 at those 3 different bitrates, then transcode each result to FLAC or some other lossless format. The transcode doesn't introduce additional loss of quality as FLAC is lossless.

This way you have a blind test, user can't tell the bitrate of the sound just by looking at the music player - right now I can just download all three samples and just by looking in foobar's status bar, I can see the bitrate.

Dude.... Thanks!!!

So let me get this straight, I need a FLAC file of the songs at say 320 kbps, then convert it to mp3, then convert it to say 256 and 128 kbps and convert those 2 back to FLAC files.

 

I chose those songs because 1. I didn't know any of this and 2. I thought a fast paced song would make it easier to tell the difference.

Also, how did you insert those FLAC files in your post? Cause that's what I indented the files to be like when I uploaded them...

 

Btw, I was kind of hoping no one would notice you can see the bit rates of the files... but apparently you did, lol

[Princess Luna]

I can totally see the difference between 128 and 320 and will pick 320 for mp3 anytime However I honestly feel that lossless FLACs are "over kill".

Just my humble opinion from a not that much of a sound enthusiastic.

[PlayStation 2]

never mind

[mariushm]

9 minutes ago, Adonis4000 said:

Dude.... Thanks!!!

So let me get this straight, I need a FLAC file of the songs at say 320 kbps, then convert it to mp3, then convert it to say 256 and 128 kbps and convert those 2 back to FLAC files.

 

I chose those songs because 1. I didn't know any of this and 2. I thought a fast paced song would make it easier to tell the difference.

 

You need to understand something first. 

There's audio codecs which compress the audio while removing a bit of audio detail in order to compress better ( MP3, AAC, AC3) ... these work like JPG image format works for images, or how h264 (avc) or h265 (hevc) or vp9  works for video - in order to fit everything in an amount of data (disk space or bitrate), some detail is lost.

Then, there's lossless codecs like FLAC or certain versions of DTS or ALAC on iTunes/Apple devices , which work like 7zip or WinRAR work:  they compress the audio without losing any quality. With such audio codecs, there's no fixed bitrate, because the amount of data required will vary depending on how complex the sound is at certain points.

So for example, you may have an audio track which starts with a person talking, in which case for those few seconds FLAC may encode the audio track at 100 kbps, and then you may have some musical instruments or a lot of noise which won't compress as well and for those moments, FLAC may need 600-1000 kbps to compress that song (2-4 times the amount of disk space / bitrate MP3 would use)

 

So first of all, if you want to make tests, you need to obtain a quality audio sample. There's several ways you can do that.

1. You find an audio CD that was "mastered" very well, before people started to raise the volume and lose audio detail in favor of volume (as I mentioned above) and use some software like Exact Audio Copy for example to "copy" the audio track to your computer, in a lossless format like "uncompressed WAV" or FLAC.

2. You go to an online store that specializes in selling high definition or high quality audio songs and buy the sample and download the lossless encoded version (FLAC or ALAC or uncompressed WAV)

3. You can download open source movies or videos with permissive licenses that have lossless audio included and extract audio from them.. for example see projects like "Big Buck Bunny" or "Elephant's Dream" or "Tears of Steel" .. here's loads more : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_films

 

Now that you have an original song (not compressed already), you can extract a segment if you want, and then from this original audio file, you create your compressed files.  So:

* you load the original uncompressed or lossless compressed audio file and save it as MP3 320 kbps file and name it "Track A.mp3"

* you load the original uncompressed or lossless compressed audio file and save it as MP3 256 kbps file and name it "Track B.mp3"

* you load the original uncompressed or lossless compressed audio file and save it as MP3 128 kbps file and name it "Track C.mp3"

 

Now you still have the original uncompressed or lossless compressed audio track, but you also have 3 different MP3 files.

You can now use a software to convert these MP3 files to a format where the bitrate has no meaning, and the simplest and easiest to work with format would be FLAC.

 

The easiest tool I know of that would do this would be foobar2000 : http://www.foobar2000.org/download

It's an audio player.. but you can simply drag the MP3 files into the playlist, select them with the mouse and then right click and select "Convert..." and then choose FLAC to transcode the MP3 files back to FLAC.

You won't lose additional quality when you encode to FLAC a second time, because FLAC is lossless. The files will be larger compared with the file size of your MP3 files.

 

Again, in case it's not clear... with lossless audio codecs like FLAC you have no control over the bitrate (how much disk space or how many kbps FLAC would use to encode one second of audio). But, if you compress the audio track using mp3 at 320 kbps and then convert it to FLAC, you'd get an audio file which sounds like the mp3 320kbps file but the bitrate varies depending on the amount of sound detail there is in every second of audio.

 

Quote

Also, how did you insert those FLAC files in your post? Cause that's what I indented the files to be like when I uploaded them...

 

Btw, I was kind of hoping no one would notice you can see the bit rates of the files... but apparently you did, lol

 

I uploaded them to a file sharing website (sort of) and then I linked to them manually .. see the "Link" icon above the text box.

 

[Adonis4000]

1 hour ago, mariushm said:

 

You need to understand something first. 

There's audio codecs which compress the audio while removing a bit of audio detail in order to compress better ( MP3, AAC, AC3) ... these work like JPG image format works for images, or how h264 (avc) or h265 (hevc) or vp9  works for video - in order to fit everything in an amount of data (disk space or bitrate), some detail is lost.

Then, there's lossless codecs like FLAC or certain versions of DTS or ALAC on iTunes/Apple devices , which work like 7zip or WinRAR work:  they compress the audio without losing any quality. With such audio codecs, there's no fixed bitrate, because the amount of data required will vary depending on how complex the sound is at certain points.

So for example, you may have an audio track which starts with a person talking, in which case for those few seconds FLAC may encode the audio track at 100 kbps, and then you may have some musical instruments or a lot of noise which won't compress as well and for those moments, FLAC may need 600-1000 kbps to compress that song (2-4 times the amount of disk space / bitrate MP3 would use)

 

So first of all, if you want to make tests, you need to obtain a quality audio sample. There's several ways you can do that.

1. You find an audio CD that was "mastered" very well, before people started to raise the volume and lose audio detail in favor of volume (as I mentioned above) and use some software like Exact Audio Copy for example to "copy" the audio track to your computer, in a lossless format like "uncompressed WAV" or FLAC.

2. You go to an online store that specializes in selling high definition or high quality audio songs and buy the sample and download the lossless encoded version (FLAC or ALAC or uncompressed WAV)

3. You can download open source movies or videos with permissive licenses that have lossless audio included and extract audio from them.. for example see projects like "Big Buck Bunny" or "Elephant's Dream" or "Tears of Steel" .. here's loads more : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_films

 

Now that you have an original song (not compressed already), you can extract a segment if you want, and then from this original audio file, you create your compressed files.  So:

* you load the original uncompressed or lossless compressed audio file and save it as MP3 320 kbps file and name it "Track A.mp3"

* you load the original uncompressed or lossless compressed audio file and save it as MP3 256 kbps file and name it "Track B.mp3"

* you load the original uncompressed or lossless compressed audio file and save it as MP3 128 kbps file and name it "Track C.mp3"

 

Now you still have the original uncompressed or lossless compressed audio track, but you also have 3 different MP3 files.

You can now use a software to convert these MP3 files to a format where the bitrate has no meaning, and the simplest and easiest to work with format would be FLAC.

 

The easiest tool I know of that would do this would be foobar2000 : http://www.foobar2000.org/download

It's an audio player.. but you can simply drag the MP3 files into the playlist, select them with the mouse and then right click and select "Convert..." and then choose FLAC to transcode the MP3 files back to FLAC.

You won't lose additional quality when you encode to FLAC a second time, because FLAC is lossless. The files will be larger compared with the file size of your MP3 files.

 

Again, in case it's not clear... with lossless audio codecs like FLAC you have no control over the bitrate (how much disk space or how many kbps FLAC would use to encode one second of audio). But, if you compress the audio track using mp3 at 320 kbps and then convert it to FLAC, you'd get an audio file which sounds like the mp3 320kbps file but the bitrate varies depending on the amount of sound detail there is in every second of audio.

 

 

I uploaded them to a file sharing website (sort of) and then I linked to them manually .. see the "Link" icon above the text box.

 

Thanks man!

I understood everything you said and I will be working on it for the next few hours