blog: aliens ate my stereo sound channel

[nikos]

here's the comment area for today's blog post found at
http://zabkat.com/blog/WSH-find-low-bitrate-MP3.htm

[Tuxman]

I can't understand people who stand low bitrates and compressed-to-death MP3s.

[vserghi]

Why not rip to flac, then you have an effective high quality archive of your CD. You can re-encode the flac file to any other format you want after that

[nikos]

I can't understand people who stand low bitrates and compressed-to-death MP3s.

the same reason they use xplorer2, a quest for efficiency and optimization
flacs are 5 times as big as an average MP3, you don't see the difference until your music collection has a few thousand titles

and the extra quality you think you put into flacs is completely wasted listening to music through your computer speakers or headphones

[IainB]

I don't quite follow the point of that blog post. I think I must be missing something.
For what seems like ages now, I have used a a view in xplorer² which includes a Customize | Column set for audio files, one column being Bit rate (from File Properties).
So I can filter/sort to see see quite clearly (say) those audio files by size of the bit rate field. I have used that to establish which are the relatively crappy recordings that I need to upgrade with (say) 192bps recordings ripped off a CD-ROM.
Have I been doing it wrong all this time?

[nikos]

like I mention in the blog, it is possible to find the bitrate within xplorer2 but extracting the folder paths for further processing is easier with the provided script. It isn't impossible in xplorer2 either, I merely wanted to show how you can get extended properties from scripts

[IainB]

OIC (I think).
I probably wouldn't want to automate that beyond where it is pretty much automated for me in xplorer² anyway - e.g., (say) as a saved/predefined search for audio files with max 128bitrate, and then copy selected files' paths (Alt+c) as a "further processing list".
If I did want to automate it, then, rather than a VBA script, I would probably prefer to use an AHK (AutoHotKey) script as I am trying to learn that and it is thus more in my "recent experience" memory. I tend to reserve VBA for MS Office-related things.

Thanks for the blog post anyway. Always interesting.

[vserghi]

Nikos, while you can listen to flac files, it was more of a starting point to archive the CD on your hard drive, then re-encode it to mp3, ogg or whatever format you want afterwards. The physical CD's can put stored somewhere else then. You can pick up big hard drives for silly money these days.

[nikos]

ps. the plot thickens. While I was investigating the effect of ripping options in the stereo channel fault, it turns out that winamp plays really bad "stereo" for this badly recorded CD but using windows media player the situation is much improved. It isn't as good as ripping in mono mode but it's definitely not sounding lousy any more. That's the first major fault I found with winamp after all these years! So there's no need to re-rip 100s of CDs, just change player ...

[Kilmatead]

Vista/Win7 did something really weird that messed up the playback/recording interfacing for 3rd-party programme compatibility (5.1 surround is a bugger, never mind normal 2-channel stuff). Your man from GoldWave has wrestled with it for years with plenty of user-problems, and finally just decided to make his programme (after 20 years of devwork) not only x64-only, but to remove XP support completely.

Hardware is a goofy thing - the sound-card drivers for Vista+ are still consistently buggy, and the first few years were a nightmare in a part of the PC where most people just plugged-in and forgot about it.

[Tuxman]

and the extra quality you think you put into flacs is completely wasted listening to music through your computer speakers or headphones

Buy a set of better headphones then. So did I, and I surely didn't waste it.

[Kilmatead]

It's also not wasted if you use the original source when creating something for your wife to listen to in the Ferrari with its €8000 sound system. You do have one of those, right? I mean, it's not like anyone puts money into their kids anymore.

Only Germans (and apparently tone-deaf Apple users) would actually use headphones - they always were a closeted people.

[Tuxman]

Headphones are nice if you can't avoid moving in public. I'd assume even Irish kids make some noise though.

[Kilmatead]

Well, they used to, but that was before we forced them all to watch Battle Royale 20 years ago - now they're all quiet little mice, as it should be.

I thought you were talking about "real" headphones, not those silly little things people stick into their ears (elbows and knees not withstanding). Germans (and Bose?) seem to spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about such things for some reason. Noise-cancelling is about the only decent idea anyone seemed to have in the last 50 years. Or, at least, the only non-subjective decent idea.

[Tuxman]

I thought you were talking about "real" headphones

I was. In-ears are neat but mostly sound weird. I borrowed mine - which are rather decent indeed - a while ago. I should probably ask for their return some time soon; but then again, it's getting colder. I like my plushy over-ears for those temperatures. Beyerdynamic, by the way. BOSE doesn't make good headphones.