Jimbo
June 10th, 2005, 03:07
We have all heard of things being compared with the Quantity vs. Quality argument. Well, the music you play on your MP3 player is no different. When you are going to store music on a listening device, like an MP3 player, or a CD player that can read MP3 files, or even a computer with limited storage space, size of files starts to become important. If you are willing to sacrifice some of the quality of the sound, you can store more songs in the same amount of space.
I kept reading my MP3 player's advertising, telling how many songs I could store on it, but the numbers didn't make any sense. I was only getting about one fourth of the amount of music crammed onto my MP3 player, that the package said I could. I didn't mind, because the songs were very easily changed in about 2 minutes, and I had access to my computer every day, so I could restock my music when my current choices started to bore me.
Well, it didn't take long for me to find what the problem was. The answer lied in the details, as it often does. All the music I had stored on my computer was in MP3 format, with the "kbps" setting at 128. This setting refers to how many kilobytes of information your player will read to make one second of music.
(Kilo-Bytes Per Second). I noticed that the software that came with my player had some choices in this field. I could convert the song to the same MP3 format, but at a kbps setting all the way down to 32. With the setting at this point, I could get 4 times the music on my MP3 player. The only trade off was the quality of the sound. Just imagine yourself trying to take notes on a piece of paper, then writing the same exact notes on a piece of paper one quarter of the size. Things are going to get a little messy, squeezing the writing together tight enough to fit it all in. The same thing happens with the MP3 files. If the file has the same amount of information squeezed into a quarter of the space, some of the finer details of the sound will be lost.
I tried listening to a bunch of my songs at the 32 kbps setting, and would rather hear them at the higher setting. The drop in quality is very noticeable, although it is very tolerable, as long as you aren't looking for high quality sound. Then again, when you are listening to music in your truck, with the motor wound up, how much can you truly appreciate the quality anyway? The noise and atmosphere of a truck makes it a place that mid-quality music will do in most cases. If you are home, and relaxing with your favorite music, you can listen to the higher quality sounds then. If you have an MP3 player, and can record at the lower quality settings, experiment a little and see how low a quality you can tolerate, all in the name of getting more songs on the player. My player was able to hold about 35 songs at the higher quality setting, but now I can fit over 120 songs on it, if it's going to be a long time before I can change the songs.
I hope this info helps a few people out here. As always, please don't hesitate to E-mail or PM me if you have any questions with anything I have written here.
I kept reading my MP3 player's advertising, telling how many songs I could store on it, but the numbers didn't make any sense. I was only getting about one fourth of the amount of music crammed onto my MP3 player, that the package said I could. I didn't mind, because the songs were very easily changed in about 2 minutes, and I had access to my computer every day, so I could restock my music when my current choices started to bore me.
Well, it didn't take long for me to find what the problem was. The answer lied in the details, as it often does. All the music I had stored on my computer was in MP3 format, with the "kbps" setting at 128. This setting refers to how many kilobytes of information your player will read to make one second of music.
(Kilo-Bytes Per Second). I noticed that the software that came with my player had some choices in this field. I could convert the song to the same MP3 format, but at a kbps setting all the way down to 32. With the setting at this point, I could get 4 times the music on my MP3 player. The only trade off was the quality of the sound. Just imagine yourself trying to take notes on a piece of paper, then writing the same exact notes on a piece of paper one quarter of the size. Things are going to get a little messy, squeezing the writing together tight enough to fit it all in. The same thing happens with the MP3 files. If the file has the same amount of information squeezed into a quarter of the space, some of the finer details of the sound will be lost.
I tried listening to a bunch of my songs at the 32 kbps setting, and would rather hear them at the higher setting. The drop in quality is very noticeable, although it is very tolerable, as long as you aren't looking for high quality sound. Then again, when you are listening to music in your truck, with the motor wound up, how much can you truly appreciate the quality anyway? The noise and atmosphere of a truck makes it a place that mid-quality music will do in most cases. If you are home, and relaxing with your favorite music, you can listen to the higher quality sounds then. If you have an MP3 player, and can record at the lower quality settings, experiment a little and see how low a quality you can tolerate, all in the name of getting more songs on the player. My player was able to hold about 35 songs at the higher quality setting, but now I can fit over 120 songs on it, if it's going to be a long time before I can change the songs.
I hope this info helps a few people out here. As always, please don't hesitate to E-mail or PM me if you have any questions with anything I have written here.