Audacity Forum

Hello thar. I'm completely new to this Audacity thing, but after wanting to change the bit rates for a couple of my songs in my library, I found a YouTube video that someone made where they use Audacity to do so.

I'm using Audacity Ver 1.2, not the new beta, as I couldn't find out how to change the bit rate with that one.

I have a song that is, believe it or not, ripped at 16 kbps D: while the rest of the songs on that album are ripped at a comfy 192 kbps. After following all the appropriate instructions for changing the bit rate of a file, after I encode/export as MP3 to my computer, not only do I not notice even a slight difference in sound quality, but the highest I'm able to rip the file to is 64 kbps, even though in the settings I set it to rip at 192 kbps. Consequently, when I export it as a WAV file, somehow I'm able to rip it to 178 kbps, unfortunately with still no improvement in sound quality or clarity.

The question is rather simple. Is there something wrong with the song I have, or am I not doing something right?

chrisftl wrote:I have a song that is, believe it or not, ripped at 16 kbps D: while the rest of the songs on that album are ripped at a comfy 192 kbps. After following all the appropriate instructions for changing the bit rate of a file, after I encode/export as MP3 to my computer, not only do I not notice even a slight difference in sound quality, but the highest I'm able to rip the file to is 64 kbps, even though in the settings I set it to rip at 192 kbps. Consequently, when I export it as a WAV file, somehow I'm able to rip it to 178 kbps, unfortunately with still no improvement in sound quality or clarity.

I am thoroughly confused by that description
Can you explain step by step what you have done, and what you are trying to do. You could start by describing how you are "ripping" this album - is it a CD album? What software are you using for ripping? ....

stevethefiddle wrote:

chrisftl wrote:I have a song that is, believe it or not, ripped at 16 kbps D: while the rest of the songs on that album are ripped at a comfy 192 kbps. After following all the appropriate instructions for changing the bit rate of a file, after I encode/export as MP3 to my computer, not only do I not notice even a slight difference in sound quality, but the highest I'm able to rip the file to is 64 kbps, even though in the settings I set it to rip at 192 kbps. Consequently, when I export it as a WAV file, somehow I'm able to rip it to 178 kbps, unfortunately with still no improvement in sound quality or clarity.

I am thoroughly confused by that description
Can you explain step by step what you have done, and what you are trying to do. You could start by describing how you are "ripping" this album - is it a CD album? What software are you using for ripping? ....

It is an MP3 album. It's Abigor's Supreme Immortal Art album, specifically (not expecting anyone to recognize it, but for clarification purposes...), that I have downloaded off the internet (Clearly, at one point, it was on a CD, but I digress). Somehow, every song on that album is ripped at a bit rate of 192kbps, while the last song is 16 kbps. Needless to say, it sounds terrible. Using Audacity 1.2 (not the 1.3 beta) and the LAME codec, I intend to change the bit rate of the song to match that of the rest of the album. Step by step, I open the song in audacity. I go to edit>preferences and and go to the file formats tab. After I set the bit rate to 192, I click OK and go to file>export as MP3 and choose the folder I want it saved in. I got these instructions from a YouTube video I stumbled upon randomly and decided, "I need to do that." Anyway, after doing all that, supposedly the song is supposed to be at the appropriate bit rate, but every time I've done it, not only has the sound quality of the MP3 not changed, but the bit rate only goes as high as 64 kbps. Just to make sure nothing was funky, I decided to instead try file>export to WAV after setting the bit rate once again on a second try, since WAV files are uncompressed and usually have better sound quality than that of an MP3. Once I did that, I still did not notice a change in sound quality, but the bit rate was 178 kbps, versus my intended 192.

Thanks, that's very clear now.

MP3 is a type of file compression called "lossy compression". What MP3 encoding does is to throw away some of the audio data (some of the "less important" information) and then squash the remaining bits tight together, thus making the file size (and bit rate) much smaller. Unfortunately, as data is thrown away, some of the sound quality is lost and the resulting MP3 does not sound quite as good as the original because some of the data is missing.

The higher the compression settings are, the more data is thrown away, so the smaller the file size will be, and the worse the sound quality will be. This happens as an inevitable consequence of this type of file compression, and the damage is permanent. There is no way to recover the data that has been thrown away.

No matter what bit-rate you use, re-encoding to a different MP3 format can only make the sound quality get worse. The only difference between encoding a bad sounding file at a high bit rate and a low bit rate, is that the low bit rate will make it sound a lot worse, whereas the high bit rate will only make it sound a bit worse.

Saving the bad quality MP3 as a wav file will sound just as bad as the original MP3 - no better and no worse.