Hello! I’m here again with another stupid question but i can’t get my head around bitrate.
I have a .WAV file with sample rate 32 kHz and bitrate 1024 kbts. I want to convert it to .MP3 but can’t choose the bitrate. As far as i read i need to choose a bitrate of 126 kbts. But why and what explanation behind this?
Spectrum analysis if needed below.
Thanks in advance!
Also, here’s a Wikipedia link with guidelines on when to use how many bits: Bit rate - Wikipedia
The “correct” bitrate depends on what the content is, and what your intended use is. The fewer bits you use, the more data will be lost and the quality will be lower. For a podcast that will be listened in a car, quality loss probably doesn’t matter so you could use something low like 64k. For music, 128k is usually considered the minimum, but some people really want to use the max of 320k.
However, adding more bits also makes the file size bigger, so it’s a trade-off.
Since you seem new to this, I will also mention: MP3 files are “lossy”, which means every time you edit and then save them, the quality of the sound goes down. If the project you’re working on is important, you should keep the original files as WAV, FLAC, or WavPack, and only export to mp3 as the final step.
“But wait, there’s more!”
Stereo settings can make a difference too.
If there is a lot of music with track separation, the output format should be Stereo. If there is a lot of talk, and only occasional music, use Joint Stereo. If it is all talk and only one person, use Mono.
Mono will use half the amount of data that stereo does. Joint stereo will only use stereo when the two channels are different.