With so many computers and MP3 players out here why has there never been a commercial release of MP3 music files? Or has there been and I missed it?
You could get a lot of music on one CD of MP3 files. Is it a sound quality issue?
Well, one thing to think about … you can sell the public 15 audio cd’s for $225 or sell the public a single mp3 cd for $15. Which do you think they’re gonna do?
Also, even with only 80 or so minutes, most artists have a hard time filling up a cd with quality material. With the sheer amount of space on mp3 cd’s, they’d never be able to fill them.
I heard of garage rock compilations, full discographies of various '60s punk bands, on MP3 CDs released on a German label. I don’t know how legal they are though. My guess is they operate in a legal gray area like those live Italian import CDs.
I think MP3 discs would be the salvation of the music industry. Face it, people are downloading entire discographies for free off of usenet and P2P, but those same people would gladly shell out 20 bucks for a discography MP3 disc. The industry could revitalize their back catalogs.
Jon
I heard of garage rock compilations, full discographies of various '60s punk bands, on MP3 CDs released on a German label. I don’t know how legal they are though. My guess is they operate in a legal gray area like those live Italian import CDs.
I think MP3 discs would be the salvation of the music industry. Face it, people are downloading entire discographies for free off of usenet and P2P, but those same people would gladly shell out 20 bucks for a discography MP3 disc. The industry could revitalize their back catalogs.
Jon
I paid to download Ike Willis’ Dirty Pictures album in mp3. Don’t know if that’s what you’re looking for.
I can point out mp3.com, where you may purchase mp3s at your leasure. You can also get them to burn them onto a disk for you, but it’s then in conventional CD Audio format.
I’m pretty sure nobody bothers with this because it’s way easier to download mp3 files. Having them on a CD is almost useless, and anyone with a cable modem can have them 10 seconds after they decide they want them. Also, if I might pay $15 for a CD with only 3 songs out of 10 I really like. I won’t pay $100 for a CD with only a dozen songs out of 200 I really like.
mp3.com CD’s have two sections. One is standard redbook audio for use in a CD player. The other section is computer data. This section has mp3 files of the music on the CD and a crappy little mp3 audio player.
At least that’s how the CD’s were formatted a year or so ago.
Also,. mp3.com only used to allow 128kbps encoded mp3 files from the artist. When my band first put music on mp3.com we were limited to 128k as the highest encoding (which is one of the reasons www.ampcast.com was a major draw to us because they allow ANY encoding rate)
My band is planning a release in the near future that will be a collection of music (like a CD filled with favourites across all the albums). We are considering having the buyer choose between two different versions of the release -either higher encoded mp3 files on one CD or two CD’s with regular redbook files.
I speak now, not as a partisan for the commercial aspects of mp3’s - but rather, purely as an audiophile, and as a lover of true hi-fidelity music.
If you’ve never done this before, do the following… somehow, by hook or by crook, get your hands on a truly professional “studio standard” set of Sennheiser headphones. They would be costing at least say $200 US I’d wager.
Then, listen to a CD of an album recorded PRIOR to the digital era - something like say, “Dark Side of the Moon” or “Physical Graffitti”. Adjust your volume levels so that you can hear every little subtle nuance. With a set of headphones that good, during the opening to “The Great Gig in the Sky” for example, you can actually hear the musicians breathing in silence in Abbey Road’s Studio Two, waiting for their turn to start playing. You can hear the piano reverberating off the studio walls. Sure, you can hear a tiny trace of tape hiss as well, but who cares? You can actually HEAR the ambience of the room they’re playing in.
Then, listen to a modern song recorded in the digital era, which has been mastered to the point of being so loud that you can actually hear square wave-form distortion. Make sure you’re listening to an mp3 version of it too… that way you’ll be sure to hear that dreadful trademark squelching sound where all the integrity of high frequencies are squished into one monophonic bland squeal.
Your jaw will drop as to how bad they sound. Ahhh… but I hear you say… not if you listen to a 320kbps mp3! Well, in response, I say bullshit. You can’t get something for nothing. You can’t compress 55MB of data into 12MB of data without SOME degree of sonic compromise. MP3’s are convenient - inarguably - but if you’ve never truly been introduced to a magnificent hi-fi system which plays audiophile recordings, you’ve got no idea how bad mp3’s sound.
Moreover, anyone who tells me, with a straight face, that modern music “sounds” better than pre 1983 recordings (with the exception of a very select few recordings by people who are true hi-fi freaks) well, they’re talking through their ass. I’m not discussing the songwriting here - that’s another discussion altogether - merely, I’m debating the crap that the digital era has introduced to music production.
Since 1995 in particular, the trend has been to squash music louder and louder and louder by providing a devastating mix of compression and limiting. It’s reached the point now where I can hear distortion ALL OF THE TIME in modern music.
I can’t remember the last modern album which gave me a sense of being “in the studio” with the musos.
Purely from a music loving point of view, mp3’s are the death knell of true hi-fi.
The analogy I’ll draw here is this… consider the mega famous chariot scene in Ben Hur, and now compare it to a modern computer generated action sequence in modern film. I for one am getting sick and tired of watching films which contain shit in them which you know isn’t truly there. “Minority Report” was a great example… those pixellated helicopters looked trashy. Now, revisit the chariot scene… how incredibly rich was that? It was real… the film was real…
Well, in a nutshell, that’s what has happened in the digital era of music now… once you’re in the digital domain you can apply all sorts of mathematical algorithms to pretend something is better than it really is, but you only have to revisit a true masterpiece with a great hi-fi to hear how empty it really is.
And it doesn’t have to be popular music either. Anything from Miles Davis in 1958 thru to John Coltrane, or a symphony recording. Across the board, the digital era has made things quicker to make, and louder too - but shit it sounds bad. And mp3’s are even worse.
It doesn’t matter if there isn’t as much bass in an old recording. It doesn’t matter if it’s not (seemingly) as loud. Those are just the gimmicks that modern producers use to fool us. The reality is that pre 1983 music required expert musicianship and recording studios to make a great product - and the final outcome was superior in terms of ambience and performance.
Well, Boo Boo Foo, I don’t think this was intended to become a GD about Digital versus Analogue, but I would like to make a couple points.
First, I don’t think there are many people out there who have equipment anywhere near your Sennheisers or my Grados. On anything less than the highest fidelity, the difference between analogue and digital is inaudible.
Second, when compared to a Redbook CD, VBR Mp3 is practically indistinguishable, even on the best gear. This, provided you use LAME encoding. I will admit that there are some encoder’s and decoders that just plain sound like crap.
Third, I think your 1983 date has some relevance, but is by no means absolute. For me, the all time best sounding jazz recordings (vinyl or cd) are the SACD re-master of Brubeck’s Take 5 (1956), and a live DSD recording of The Very Tall Man Group at the Blue Note. (also SACD, 1999).
Almost 50 years apart, but both knock your socks off. They still make good recordings, but they are admittedly rare.
Clearly, lossy compression like MP3 (and JPEG, MPEG, Vorbis, AAC…) works by eliminating data. That’s what makes it lossy.
But the question is, can you perceive a difference in quality? Lossy compression assumes that human perception is limited[sup]*[/sup], and that people won’t notice the missing data. Both of those assumptions are correct to varying extents for different people.
If you can’t stand the loss of quality in a 320 kbps MP3, well, you should stick to your $200 headphones and $10,000 stereo. But most people can’t notice an improvement in MP3 quality past about 192 kbps (depending on the encoder), and most people can’t tell the difference between a 192 kbps MP3 and the CD from which it was ripped. For them, MP3 is perfect.
- Not just perception of different frequencies, but perception of different frequencies simultaneously. When you hear frequency X, you become desensitized to frequencies Y and Z. There’s been some speculation (on Slashdot a while back) that your brain needs those frequencies to be present to “tune” your hearing, even though you can’t perceive them, and that listening to too many MP3s could alter your hearing. So be sure to go outside once in a while.
You know tastycorn, the issue for me isn’t so much whether digital is superior to analogue - in many respects it is - certainly in the context of being more truthful regarding it’s dynamics.
The problem for me is the way that the digital domain is being abused to make things seem louder than ever before. The thinking behind this is pretty vacuous actually - there is a belief amongst the marketing people that most (as in 99% of people) believe that louder is better - when in reality, if louder is all you want, you can simply turn up your volume knob.
THere’s a syndrome in modern music nowadays called Loud Wars - in which everyone wants THEIR album to be louder than the previous album in your car’s CD stacker. OK, fine… but the problem with this is that to achieve such a thing, you have to push more, and more, and more of your source signal towards to 0db ceiling which exists within ALL digital sound media. In essence, this syndrome is ruining music by forcing it to try and sound like an annoyingly loud TV commercial - and quite frankly, it’s so pervasive now that a record like “Roxanne” by The Police say, is fully 10db quieter than say “Time like These” by The Foo Fighters.
My point however, is this - if you listen to both songs on your typical FM radio station, in all probablity, Roxanne will sound superior - and the reason is because radio stations apply signal compressors of their own to maximise their airwave bandwidth, and modern records are so squashed to begin with that a lot of radio stations are now interpreting modern music as being white noise - which in turns get’s attenuated before getting on air. The ultimate irony in this is that your typical 20 year old record actually seems to have more “life” on FM radio than a modern tune.
However, this thread is about mp3’s - and my issue regarding mp3’s primarily revolves around what they do to modern music. Naturally, I’m familiar with variable bit rate mp3’s etc - and yes, they can sound pretty bloody good. But they sound best with music which doesn’t feature square wave-forms. Digital clipping is what we can hear nowadays in modern music as it buys more and more into LOUD WARS. Digital clipping, in minute amounts isn’t immediately noticeable. LOUD WARS gambles that they can raise the amount of digital clipping from “minute” to “noticeable” without getting busted - and we audiophiles can hear it - quite noticeably actually.
And an mp3 encoder, when it hits a square waveform just plain shits itself. Hence, a new loud record encoded as an mp3 actually is poorer quality than an old record like Roxeanne. What makes me sad about all of this of course is that so many young folks today, who naturally love music, will never get to hear a magnificent album which HASN’T gone thru the violent compression and limiting process. Quite incorrectly, they will perceive a masterpiece by Sinatra in 1958 with the Nelson Riddle Orchestra as being shit simply because it isn’t as loud as their White Stripes CD - when all they have to do is turn up the volume knob.
And worst of all, the youth of today will probably never get to hear an awesome $3000 turntable fitted with a $600 moving coil cartridge playing an audiophile 200 gram limited pressing vinyl LP. It’s not so much that vinyl is superior to CD, but rather, a mint condition audiophile vinyl pressing of a true reel to reel classic recording NEVER went through the digitisation process - like ever - and as such, it’s more truthful in it’s dynamics. That’s what’s hard to get across to people… the beauty of dynamics. A genuinely great hi-fi should be in a really silent room - so slient that you can hear the background hiss. Then you turn it up REAL LOUD and let it do it’s thing… the ultimate irony is that a redbook CD might have 96db of range, and yet LOUD WARS has effectively forced the modern public to accept music with less than 15db of dynamic movement - whereas an audiophile vinyl recording has at least, say 60db of magnificent dynamic range - and ALL of it used you see…
I don’t think the OP wanted a generic analog vs. digital or compressed vs. uncompressed recordings. An MP3 CD-ROM has certain advantages and in some cases it would be an ideal format. For example, the unabridged audiobook of the Lord of the Rings is sold as a 46-CD box set. If you used compression it would fit on a single CD. Or a few more if you use lower compression.
My guess is that there are still quite a few people who do not have MP3 capable players. While most people have computers these days, not many people have it hooked up to decent speakers and set up in a location where they listen to music or audiobooks. Very few of us have MP3 capable car audio systems. And MP3 has the unfortunate association with piracy, so I think paying customers and publishers both shy away from it.
I have a commercially released CD of mp3s. It’s all Polish dance music of unknown artists.
I can notice quality above 192kbps. It sounds fuller and louder. 
Can someone show me something that in fact shows data is lossed with an MP3? It’s my understanding that an MP3 is compressed data. And an MP3 player…uncompresses that data to play it.
Example: Your zip files. You zip a 100k word document and it comes out to be 10k. When you go to unzip it, it goes back to 100k, any data loss?
The only way your music is going to sound better than studio quality, is if your playing your music through studio equipment. Which includes, multi-channel mixers, 1000’s of knobs for effects and equilization, and bad ass speakers, and many, many other types of expensive equipment.
Opinionis say phonographs may sound better than MP3’s, but upon hearing my 5000’s MP3s compared to records, MP3’s win hands down. I don’t care how much you paid for your record player, it makes crackling noises that are unpleasant. And it doesn’t have shuffle. So gone with your hyping up phonographs compared to MP3’s. Your arguments are useless and pointless, unless you have a fold away record player in your dash with some kind of skip control, you don’t hold water.
MP3 is NOT zipped. It is called a “lossy compression” because it reduces the data by throwing away the parts that (most) people won’t hear.
Simple lossless compression (zip) can get a compression rate of about 2 to 1. Sometimes more, sometimes less depending on the material to be compressed - but it won’t be a great difference.
MP3 compression allows much higher compression ratios, but it does throw away data. I’d have to explain the whole operation of the system to make it clear exactly how and why - but it does.
If there were no loss involved, you wouldn’t hear a difference between 128kBit and 32kBit encoded MP3s, and everybody would use the lowest data rate.
Boo Boo Foo has a point about LPs. Technically, the LP is inferior to a CD. Pratically, the LP producers (the good ones, anyway) put more effort into making a clear recording and less into playing funky digital games with the audio - which makes the LP sound better.
Were someone today to go to the same lengths to produce clear recordings as the guys did way back when, then with today’s equipment and the CD’s 96 dB dynamic range you could get some truly mind blowing albums.
Boo Boo Foo has hit it pretty well it the nail on the head in blaming it on compression. Modern recordings don’t come close to utilizing the full dynamic range available. The 15dB value he quoted is what I’ve heard elsewhere. The producers smash the levels from the individual instruments and singers into that narrow range, and leave you with no feeling for the relative loudness of the various parts. It gets everything right there “in your face,” so to speak, but it doesn’t leave much room for expression.
As an example, a drummer and a guitarist might be playing along at pretty much the same volume level. The music comes to a place with a dramatic change, and to emphasize this, the drummer hammers out a really loud drumroll. There’s thirty or forty dB of volume change, easy. And the producers mix it down and compress it into the 15dB, and you lose a great deal of the drummer’s emphasis.
Doubtless this helps keep from blasting the neighbors out of bed with sudden loud noises. I do think, as does apparently Boo Boo Foo, that the compression (as bass and treble controls and equalizing) should be done in the stereo system instead of in the production studio. That lets me decide how much I want to squeeze things - maybe I don’t want to unexpectedly rattle the windows and wake the kiddies late in the evening when I’m listening to some good music. Then again, maybe I wan’t to let it really blast, and have the normal passages god and loud - and let the loud stuff break windows around the neighborhood.
Then, too, you might not want to hear an uncompressed version of some of the stuff coming out as pop music these days. The compression can cover a multitude of sins on the part of the musicians. Fingers dragging guitar strings is one example that springs to mind. A radio station over here once played an unplugged version of a song by the Dave Mathews band - and I called and asked them to please never do that again, it was so horrid. Fingers dragging all over the place - and not on purpose.
Here’s a site with info on how MP3 works:
http://www.vectorsite.net/ttdcmp3.html#m3
It’s a great hairy mess, and you can see why I didn’t want to try to explain it.
Ackkk.
I just realized that I’ve not differentiated between dynamic compression and data compression in that last post.
The two are enormously different. Data compression refers to reducing the amount of space it takes to keep the data on your hard disk. Dynamic compression refers to the trick of varying the amplification of the audio signal so as to minimize variations in the amplitude.
I hope it is clear from context which is which in my previous post. Dynamic compression is culprit number one in the poor sound of modern recordings.
Here are two simple tests:
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Make a WAV file (test.wav), then encode it (test.mp3), then decode it to a separate file (test.mp3.wav). Open test.wav and test.mp3.wav in a waveform editor, and you can see that the waveforms are different.
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Encode the same WAV file to a 32 kbps MP3, 64 kbps MP3, and 160 kbps MP3. Notice that they sound different - that’s what lossy compression does.
With lossless algorithms like ZIP or RAR, you can (sometimes) get better compression by putting more CPU effort into the compression process, but the data doesn’t actually change. You can make two ZIP files, one with “fastest” compression and one with “best” compression, and when you unzip them, the decompressed files will still be exactly the same.
Yes, ZIP is a lossless algorithm, but MP3 is not. Try zipping a 10 MB WAV file and you won’t get it much smaller than 5 MB. With MP3 you can get it down to about 1 MB without much change in quality.
I have to disagree. Vinyl has limitations in frequency which varied depending on which track you were on. Mixing for vinyl is an artform because of this. You also couldn’t just put tracks in any order because the inner tracks didn’t produce wide frequencies as well as the outer tracks -which is why most LP’s have slower, quiet songs at the end of each side.
Vinyl is also an unstable format. Each time you play the LP it slowly wears out.
Now, I will agree that new producers have become compression crazy. I think this is because the advent of home recording produced more home taught engineers who never really learned how to work a console and the outboard. I’ve heard of people compressing EVERY track on mixdown. To me, this is NUTS. Not every track needs compression. It’s a tool to control tracks that tent to fluctuate -like bass guitar and vocals. But if you have a nice smooth track with a steady volume and frequency, there is no need to compress it. But that’s just my method of recording/mixing.
The beauty of digital is “what you put in is what you get out” -unlike analog. Recording to tape is different then into a digital recorder because you have to know the limitations of your analog gear. With digital you can just pump anything into the mix and it will playback the same.
Now, about hearing people in the background on Pink Floyd albums. To me, this screams bad recording. If someone produces a studio album, the only thing I want to hear is the music and the vocals. (live albums or recording an entire band at once is a different story)
In a studio recording, I don’t want to hear people shuffling their feet, picking their nose or scratching their butt (my microphones will pick up these sounds if I let them). The reason you DON’T hear these artifacts in new music is because people are more anal about removing this junk during mixdown. I gate every live track I record. This automaticly shuts off the volume of the track when it’s not being used. If I didn’t do this, you would have far too much background noise because my equipment is far more sensitive then what Pink Floyd used in their glory days. And my gear is only really considered “mid pro level”.
This really needs it’s own thread… perhaps in GD
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- Random thoughts tossed in:
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- I have read that even now, over 75% of all commercial studio releases are mastered through all-tube equipment onto analog tape. CD’s mastered “all digital” used to make a note of it on the covers, but you don’t see that anymore, because most aren’t. Most musicians and producers prefer the tube/analog results.
- I agree, much modern music is compressed too hot and has basically no dynamic range at all. This is typical now of “radio mixes” of pop music–but it doesn’t have anything to do with format or compression–it is a mastering decision, plain and simple.
- Regarding MP3’s, 128 sounds lousy, the cymbals get all warbly. I need to go up to at least 192Kb before I am satisfied with the playback on my cheap-a$$ PC setup. Considering that a “CD-equivalent” MP3 is 320Kb/sec, it’s a matter of personal preference how much music can be “compressed” without losing quality… -unless we can include ATRAC-4/Minidisc…
- Some performers have long made it a habit to attempt to fill the entire CD. They Might Be Giants is one that usually puts nearly the maximum on every CD, 16-20 songs is normal.
Oh, I agree, without doubt… there can be no denying, even with a magnificent German stylus which is only 0.3 mm in size, that even the greatest 200g modern super vinyl which you can get your hands on nowadays is going to wear out with every individual playing of that record.
So what I tend to do is I actually play my audiophile disks into my Aardvark 24bit 96khz soundcard and record the songs I want to record for all time. Then, I normalise those tracks so that the peaks are topping at -0.2db shy of maximum and then keep THOSE wave files on my playback PC. The soundcard in that PC, as I said, is a professional Direct Pro 24/96 with “lead shielding” and the results of THAT system is amazing because obviously the digital stream is never going to degrage ever again.
It’s worth noting however, that if you visit a site like this one… www.classicrecs.com you’ll see what these guys are doing now for the purists of this world. They’re making arrangements with the most famous albums of all time and taking the true, top of the pyramid “production master tapes” and cutting a female laquer live, straight from the tape. They then silver plate the laquer and make a male master stamp. From there, they press 800 or so copies… and THOSE are the 200gram disks you can buy from them.
To listen to one of those disks, if your turntable is good enough, is a revelation. Simply because you are only 3 generations away from being in the studio with the original performance.
Rarely does the public get to buy such “minimal generation” music. Obviously, the digital era allows the dissemination of master streams to go around the world for pressing plants to manufacture en masse with little degradation, but sadly, the current fashion to squash the bejesus out of them makes the process all a moot point anyway.
In short, yes it’s true that modern systems allow great fidelity than ever before - my beef is that the marketing fashions of the modern era have chosen to throw that potential out the window, and in turn, most modern albums have nowhere the “life and ambience” which pre digital recorded albums used to have.
As for the “ambience aspects” of a famous performance, say like Miles Davis in 1958? Well, yes, that’s a matter of taste without doubt. Some people like the humanity of little background noises - others don’t.
Personally, for mine, I love it because you know, in those days, punch in recording etc didn’t exist and as such, they really had to lay down magnificent takes without being able to go back and do much in the way of overdubs. It was harder to do, and it gives me a buzz to hear how hard it was for them to do - you can hear the concentration and the discipline etc. As a musician, that’s a cool thing to hear. But yes, I accept that it can be distracting as well.
But believe me when I say this… the Classic Records people, and firms like them? Those guys are making vinyl pressings of famous masterpieces nowadays which are breathtaking. It’s quite a ground movement if truth be known.