Audio Quality

[Hawks]

Hello! Finally I've decided to organise my music collection and with these important plans comes an even more important thing. I need to choose in which quality I want my stuff to be! So I would like to ask you for the advice and maybe to give me a small instruction on music qualities. Which one to choose? What are the best? Easiest to get? 

of course I could try to google everything, but I think that it is better to ask PHF community! Can't wait to hear your advices, instructions, guides, articles & everything else that will came into your minds!  

btw: if someone could explain me differences between all of these m4p/i+ etc  comparison to 320 is warmly welcome!

[Versace]

all the official releases I try to get in iTunes quality (.m4a), the unreleased stuffs in 320kpbs or 254 (but sometimes you have to be satisfied with 192kbps) 

[Hawks]

oh, okay.

Still waiting for more of your opinions and descriptions of your music experiences  

[IntoYouu]

I personally try to find 320 kbps mp3, the quality satisfies me a lot. There is m4a, amazing quality as well, but most audio programs don't support it, so it's a no for me (m4a are smaller than mp3 files, that's a plus). The best are obviously .wav and .flac, you get the best quality out of those. And again audio programs support .wav's, but most dont support .flac, so I try avoiding it. The easiest to get are obviously mp3's, everyone uses that format because every single device/program is able to open it. My advice would be that if you don't use audio programs and you want to have more disk space, then go for m4a. But if you're into programs, then choose mp3/wav. From my personal experience I can tell you that not many people use flac, whenever they get a flac file, they usually convert it to wav. 

I hope I helped at least a bit

[William]

[Main Pop Girl]

I'm not super obsessive about audio quality like some people, but I do like to try and have iTunes + quality in my library for most official releases! It's harder to do for unreleased things tho so I'll generally just grab the best quality available.  The best is obviously lossless files, but they won't generally play in iTunes so you can't put them on your iPhone or anything.  

[Hawks]

What's different in iTunes + quality? 

I was thinking bout 320 & FLAC's, because first is easy to obtain and second can sound heavenly (thanks to my UV experience) but FLAC takes lots of space and it's not so easy to get

10 hours ago, VisKip said:

Audio quality is not the bitrate that iTunes reports or the container that it is in. Educate yourself, just don't think mama Beyoncé is going to do it for you, she'll just learn you 1 topic and give u lemonades.

idc bout itunes honey and mama Beyoncé better keep on not promoting ha new album 

gimme birdhoe

[Main Pop Girl]

15 hours ago, Hawks said:

What's different in iTunes + quality? 

I was thinking bout 320 & FLAC's, because first is easy to obtain and second can sound heavenly (thanks to my UV experience) but FLAC takes lots of space and it's not so easy to get

idc bout itunes honey and mama Beyoncé better keep on not promoting ha new album 

gimme birdhoe

Honestly, I don't think there's really any difference in i+ quality.  It's just the easiest for me to find and so I try and standardise my library around that but it's definitely not the best quality available. But yeah, I would use flac if you could play it on your iPhone.  

[Shine]

Whenever I buy a CD in physical, I always rip it in lossless. I try to always get ALAC files mainly because I'm an audiophile.

[PrettyBitch]

You can't really even hear much of a difference above 256kbps unless the song is pretty busy, but the dynamic range of vinyl is better because the vinyl masters are less compressed  

[Main Pop Girl]

6 hours ago, PrettyBitch said:

You can't really even hear much of a difference above 256kbps unless the song is pretty busy, but the dynamic range of vinyl is better because the vinyl masters are less compressed  

Is vinyl actually worth it? I would totally buy a record player but I feel like they're so expensive, and then you have to pay for all the records on top of that...  

[PrettyBitch]

6 hours ago, Countess said:

Is vinyl actually worth it? I would totally buy a record player but I feel like they're so expensive, and then you have to pay for all the records on top of that...  

I'll post a snippet of a Kesha song for digital vs vinyl. You'll have to turn up the volume by like 10 to 20% for the vinyl, though, because it's quieter.

[PrettyBitch]

7 hours ago, Countess said:

Is vinyl actually worth it? I would totally buy a record player but I feel like they're so expensive, and then you have to pay for all the records on top of that...  

Almost imagine that you're listening to the peak of the sound when listening, and the loudness of each part. The timbre on digital is more distorted and the waveform is clipped. Just make sure to turn up the volume for vinyl so you can hear the difference  You can hear on her belts later it almost sounds squashed or trapped in the digital. Then again, I have $500 headphones so maybe you won't hear a difference l0l
Vinyl: http://picosong.com/BLJh/

Digital: http://picosong.com/BLJ5/

[Main Pop Girl]

On 5/16/2016 at 2:29 AM, PrettyBitch said:

Almost imagine that you're listening to the peak of the sound when listening, and the loudness of each part. The timbre on digital is more distorted and the waveform is clipped. Just make sure to turn up the volume for vinyl so you can hear the difference  You can hear on her belts later it almost sounds squashed or trapped in the digital. Then again, I have $500 headphones so maybe you won't hear a difference l0l
Vinyl: http://picosong.com/BLJh/

Digital: http://picosong.com/BLJ5/

Omg, this is so interesting! I actually thought it sounded clearer in the digital version...  But to be fair I'm listening through Apple headphones so maybe that's why.

[PrettyBitch]

6 hours ago, Countess said:

Omg, this is so interesting! I actually thought it sounded clearer in the digital version...  But to be fair I'm listening through Apple headphones so maybe that's why.

High frequency content can cause errors on low end audio cards etc. So there's that too