What is the point of ripping an mp3 from a cd at over 160kbps? As I understand it 128 is CD quality, and the software can’t induce quality or information that isn’t there to start with, so what benefit is there? It just seems to waste space.
Can mp3s degrade with time? On a hard-drive I mean. People I’ve asked about this have said no, but I could swear there are some mp3s on my computer that I ripped and I remember listening to with no problems, but now they have little clicks and noises in them.
Digital data can’t degrade unless the file is corrupted. If that were the case, it likely wouldn’t play at all, not suffer from degraded quality. So, no, it’s not likely.
You understand incorrectly MP3 is a lossy compression method. Information is always lost from the original CD recording. 128 is considered a reasonable compromise between file size and audio quality, but you’re still losing information and for some pieces of music the difference seems pretty noticeable to me. Modern encoders seem to make better copies these days, but I still prefer 192 or a variable bitrate.
There are always arguments over this, but the consensus would probably be that 128kbps is a little below CD quality, while 192 or 256, especially with VBR, are close to or indistinguishable from the original. I have seen good evidence that even 128kbps can be enough for some pieces of music, and little other than anecdote to suggest that anything above 200 is necessary, unless you need to de- and re-compress the mp3, perhaps if you’re mixing it with something else.
OTOH, storage space is always getting cheaper, so you might as well err on the side of caution and rip at 256kbps VBR these days.
A while back, I got the playing length and data size of about 50 CDs, and found that the encoding rate is right around 156kbps. That’s what I ripped all my mp3s at, and it seems to work pretty well.
I forgot to add, if 128 sounds fine to your ears on your equipment, I’d just stick with that. You might try an experiment though, and encode one song in 128 and another in 192 and see if you can tell the difference. But there’s no point in wasting useful space if it isn’t doing anything for you.
Speakers and headphones degrade with time, and that’s likely the cause of the problem you’re seeing. The chance that a hard disk would go bad in exactly the right way for mp3s to sound bad, but not so that you’d see general disk errors or make the file completely invalid is astronomically small.
I’m not sure if I’m interpreting this correctly, but if I am, you did the math wrong. CD’s are encoded at 44.1K samples per second, each sample is 16 bits, and there are generally 2 tracks (stereo). That comes out to 16 x 2 x 44.1K = 1.4 Mbps.
Which is why we have more compressed formats like mp3.
MP3 is a