Song Submission Quality - 192kbps?

[mojobone]

Lol. Good discussion, and good answers.

Just to be clear, the lower the bitrate your transcoding your wav file, the more information you loose. You are taking a larger (uncompressed) wav file, and transcoding it into a compressed format. The compression, by its definition, removes repetitive information, to make the file smaller. The smaller you make your mp3, the more information that is lost. It could be static noise, it could be in upper end information. Where I first really heard it, years back, is when listening to classical music, and you could really hear some strange things in the upper high-end, that sounded akin to a slight flanging.

I remember the days of 128 mp3s, and how much better the 192's sounded...then 256 and so on. I'm not talking from a low-fi to a high-fi type of difference, I'm just talking about noticeable subtleties when compressing and throwing out information.

Best way to describe it is this. Listen to your favorite album on CD (uncompressed), and then listen to the same album from mp3 files. They both sound great, but you'll find more detail in the uncompressed versions.

Worth noting that the actual hard limit on your Taxi hosting uploads is not bit rate, but file size; you can wangle a slightly higher bitrate from a shorter cue, in other words. Or at least this was true a few years ago

[AlanHall]

Lol. Good discussion, and good answers.

Just to be clear, the lower the bitrate your transcoding your wav file, the more information you loose. You are taking a larger (uncompressed) wav file, and transcoding it into a compressed format. The compression, by its definition, removes repetitive information, to make the file smaller. The smaller you make your mp3, the more information that is lost. It could be static noise, it could be in upper end information. Where I first really heard it, years back, is when listening to classical music, and you could really hear some strange things in the upper high-end, that sounded akin to a slight flanging.

I remember the days of 128 mp3s, and how much better the 192's sounded...then 256 and so on. I'm not talking from a low-fi to a high-fi type of difference, I'm just talking about noticeable subtleties when compressing and throwing out information.

Best way to describe it is this. Listen to your favorite album on CD (uncompressed), and then listen to the same album from mp3 files. They both sound great, but you'll find more detail in the uncompressed versions.

Worth noting that the actual hard limit on your Taxi hosting uploads is not bit rate, but file size; you can wangle a slightly higher bitrate from a shorter cue, in other words. Or at least this was true a few years ago

Good to know it's actually data space that limits the acceptable file parameters. Mojo, can you provide a number? I'm curious because a file submitted for the 'new age' listing was 7..8 minutes long, more than 10MB at the 192 rate.

Just to also be clear, it was mentioned (a new concept to me, I'm still [mentally] processing!) that creating MP3s from the 32-bit floating point master bus is likely to result in better audio fidelity than creating the MP3 from 16- or 24- bit .WAV files, since the .WAV file is already a reduction in quality from the DAW output.

[mojobone]

Lol. Good discussion, and good answers.

Just to be clear, the lower the bitrate your transcoding your wav file, the more information you loose. You are taking a larger (uncompressed) wav file, and transcoding it into a compressed format. The compression, by its definition, removes repetitive information, to make the file smaller. The smaller you make your mp3, the more information that is lost. It could be static noise, it could be in upper end information. Where I first really heard it, years back, is when listening to classical music, and you could really hear some strange things in the upper high-end, that sounded akin to a slight flanging.

I remember the days of 128 mp3s, and how much better the 192's sounded...then 256 and so on. I'm not talking from a low-fi to a high-fi type of difference, I'm just talking about noticeable subtleties when compressing and throwing out information.

Best way to describe it is this. Listen to your favorite album on CD (uncompressed), and then listen to the same album from mp3 files. They both sound great, but you'll find more detail in the uncompressed versions.

Worth noting that the actual hard limit on your Taxi hosting uploads is not bit rate, but file size; you can wangle a slightly higher bitrate from a shorter cue, in other words. Or at least this was true a few years ago

Good to know it's actually data space that limits the acceptable file parameters. Mojo, can you provide a number? I'm curious because a file submitted for the 'new age' listing was 7..8 minutes long, more than 10MB at the 192 rate.

Just to also be clear, it was mentioned (a new concept to me, I'm still [mentally] processing!) that creating MP3s from the 32-bit floating point master bus is likely to result in better audio fidelity than creating the MP3 from 16- or 24- bit .WAV files, since the .WAV file is already a reduction in quality from the DAW output.

Sorry, I cannot, and Taxi has upgraded its backend systems since last I tested this. However, a lot of email systems limit attachments to 10M, so that may be a good rule of thumb. It's good practice to encode MP3s from the highest resolution files, i.e. 24 bit 48kHz, rather than from 16 bit versions that will be sent to a CD plant for replication, for a couple of reasons, the main one being that the process of manufacturing a CD can tolerate way hotter peak levels than most MP3 encoders. I've happily and confidently sent off 16 bit WAV files peaking at three tenths of a decibel (0.3dBFS) but many if not most encoders need a full dB of headroom. Elsewise, the degradation is very audible.

[johnnyrowing]

The new system allows .wav submissions. Is there some kind of prohibition from using that?

I ask because I just used it for the first time. I don't want to create any obstacles.

[johnnyrowing]

The new system allows .wav submissions. Is there some kind of prohibition from using that?

I ask because I just used it for the first time. I don't want to create any obstacles.

What I understand is that you upload something in some format at some quality level, and then TAXI turns it into another format and into the quality level they want to have it in. It seems logical at least to me, that the better the quality of your upload, the better what comes out after TAXI does things to it. So, if you can upload a high quality WAV, then do it.

My 2 cents.
Tom

Your 2 cents makes sense to me. Thanks.