conversion loss rates

[DVDdoug]

The mp3DirectCut looks interesting, although I don't understand it. It will do things Audacity won't do?

It can only do very-limited editing such as cutting/trimming, splicing/pasting and adjusting the volume or fading in/out.

You cannot mix/crossfade, or do any "effects" like EQ, reverb, compression, etc., without decoding (decompressing) the audio.

[Xerlome]

Do you know anything about WEBM OGG ? or WEBM audio only OPUS? I find that these sometimes are the highest kbps for a particular item.

[kozikowski]

From your description, you have achieved the quality limit of your pipeline. The only way to get an observable increase in quality is to change one or more steps.

— Deliver in WAV.
— Start with uncompressed music.

Gently massaging the compressed deliverable in the middle will not give you any listening quality increase in the face of damage from the other steps. Further, it could cause problems if you settle on a celebrity format and Something Goes Wrong.

Weren't we going to deliver on a physical Audio CD rather than the music file? That is perfect quality WAV deliverable. What happened to that?

Koz

[Xerlome]

I need to provide programs in hour segments. WAV files proved too large to burn to a disk. Also, flash drive is more dependable (doesn't mess up) and the program manager prefers it. WAV on a flash drive will not read on the studio equipment.

It does seem that I have done about the best I can for audio quality with the available options, from what you all explained.

The question about WEBM OGG and WEBM audio only OPUS is: what are they and how do they compare to other file types discussed?
I'm talking about these as original source files, not conversions to them.

[kozikowski]

I need to provide programs in hour segments. WAV files proved too large to burn to a disk.

Maybe a Data CD. An Audio CD like you buy in a store will record 74 minutes. Audio CD is a special, space-saving, loss-less version of WAV format. For example, one of the ways they did that was to eliminate options. Audio CDs always have the same sound format and the player always looks for that one format.

An Audio CD burning program will ask you about the space between songs (default is two seconds). A Data CD burning program doesn't. A Data CD is a flat, shiny hard drive. You can put Photoshop files on there if you want. An Audio CD is limited to sound files.

If your computer will burn a disk by just dragging files to a disk icon, chances are very good you got a Data CD. Audio CDs are created by an Audio CD Authoring and Burning Program such as Windows Media or iTunes.

WEBM OGG and WEBM audio only OPUS is: what are they

First I've heard of them. Maybe one of the other elves will chime in.

Koz

[Gale Andrews]

The question about WEBM OGG and WEBM audio only OPUS is: what are they and how do they compare to other file types discussed? I'm talking about these as original source files, not conversions to them.

WEBM is a video container format. The audio in the container could be OGG or OPUS. You would need FFmpeg to import the audio from that format into Audacity.

What are you trying to do?


Gale

[steve]

Audacity can import / export Ogg files.
For importing / exporting WEBM (a video format) or OPUS (an audio format) you need to have FFmpeg installed (see http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/faq_ ... tml#ffdown)

[kozikowski]

What are you trying to do?

Create a broadcast radio program from best-quality, costless, ripped soundfiles.
Koz

[Gale Andrews]

What are you trying to do?

Create a broadcast radio program from best-quality, costless, ripped soundfiles.
Koz

Well, you can listen to the files after importing them. For the same file size, OGG is probably higher quality than all but the highest bit rate MP3's. OPUS files are very small. For classical music I don't find them as good as high bit rate MP3. You can have terrible sounding files in any of those formats, however high the encoding settings are.

The file size of the original files is immaterial, because Audacity will expand them to lossless PCM when it imports them.


Gale

[cyrano]

I need to investigate the other lossless types.

It wouldn't take much investigation. FLAC as I understand it is the only zero-damage compressed format.

There are at least several others. Wavpack, to name just one. The rest is fairly obscure.