Codecs?

[Chewie]

What do you all normally save your files as?

I've heard of APE but I haven't really used it.

And with MP3s there are so many options that I don't understand and I can't find explainations for on the net. For example doesanyone know what the diffrent VBR options are about? All the options I'm talking about can be seen in Cdex.

Buit does anyone just leave them as wav? What other lossless codecs you all use?

 

[genob]

.WAV is a lossless media (raw samples are stored into a big file).... these files are what I save my recorded audio as.... (99.9999999% of the people in the world of digital audio in pc's do the same).

.MP3 is a lossy media (it is compressed using a huffman encoding scheme). With MP3 you have 2 basic ways to store a frame, either a CONSTANT BITRATE or VARIABLE BITRATE.

Constant Bitrate: When you see the options like 128k or 192k etc.. this means the number of kilobits per second (which also pertains to how many bits per frame). The constant part of this is that each frame will be the same exact size through out the mp3 file, even when there is silence, the frames are still the same size.

Variable Bitrate: This is a more complex encoding scheme where each frame is a different size. The basic algorithm is: base each time/frame on the velocity of the waveform... so in otherwords, if there's silence, make the frame as small as possible.... There is more to this, but that is a basic way VBR works.

A good decoder will be able to decode both Constant and Variable bitrate. Older decoders sometimes have trouble with VBR files.

When setting up your encoder you can just set it to constant and pick a good rate around 128-192k where you can have good compression without a huge amount of high frequency aliasing.

just my 2 cents,

g