I’m told by ACX that my bit rate needs to be 192 kbps or higher … but that’s all Greek to me:
First, I don’t even know what that means
Second, I have no idea as how to achieve what they want
Can someone give me a step by step process to accomplish this ???
When ypu Export as MP3, ensure that you have the settings:
“MP3”
“Constant”
“192”
BINGO !!! Thanx for the simple answer … what does this change in the bit rate actually mean/do?
what does this change in the bit rate actually mean/do?
It’s the amount of compression. A lower bitrate means more compression (smaller files) and a higher bitrate generally gives you better quality. (With voice, and even with music, you may not actually hear any quality difference with a higher bitrate.)
kbps is kilo_bits_ per second. There are 8-bits in a byte so if you divide by 8 and multiply by 60 you can get the file size in kilo bytes per minute.
Since MP3 is lossy compression, this should be your LAST STEP before submission. Intermediate files should be saved as (exported to) WAV (or FLAC). If you re-open the MP3 for editing it gets decompressed. Then if you export to MP3 again you are going through another generation of lossy compression, and the “damage” does accumulate.
When you create an MP3, the audio data is encoded in a special way that reduces the amount of data, so that the MP3 file is a lot smaller than the original audio data. During the encoding process, there is some reduction in sound quality. This is called “lossy compression” (because the data is “compressed” to make it smaller, at the expense of losing some audio quality).
The trade-off between file size and audio quality is obviously important because you want to retain good audio quality. The “kbps” setting is the number of “bits” (binary digits) per second of audio. The more “bits per second”, the better the quality, but the larger the file size. The less “bits per second”, the smaller the file size but the worse the sound quality.
“192 kbps” means “192,000 bits per second” and is high quality for MP3.