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The Ghost in the MP3 (2014)

theghostinthemp3.com

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Re: The Ghost in the MP3 (2014)

#41

Post by peanut-walrus »

hctaw wrote: post #18
underseacables wrote: post #6

Wow this is really fascinating. I’ve seen a lot of support for FLAC but I’ve never been able to get an iPhone or iPod to read them. I wonder why flac and other high end lossless file formats are not supported.

Lossless is only useful as an archival or intermediary format during production/recording where you can't tolerate lossy encoding. For listening purposes lossy codecs are all capable of being perceptually lossless for trained or untrained listeners, including MP3. MP3 gets a bad rap because low bitrate mp3 does sound awful. 320kbps or higher is sufficient for 99% of listeners, including audiophiles. Most listeners ca…

Sure, but...

Have you seen the size of disks and network bandwidth recently? There is absolutely no reason to bother with lossy audio compression.

Re: The Ghost in the MP3 (2014)

#42

Post by NathanielK »

igneo676 wrote: post #39
dbatten wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the implication was that, once mp3 is no longer a household format, there will be a certain type of person who feels a nostalgia for the "sound" of mp3s, maybe even advocating that it was "better" in some way than the sound of whatever comes next... This is basically what's happened with vinyl records at this point, right? People have a nostalgia for their sound, even though by any scientific or technical mea…

Supposedly, one of the big reasons people prefer vinyl is not because of the medium. It's because of the mastering process. CDs and/or Streaming services are victims of the "loudness" wars, resulting in music with low dynamic range. Since vinyl is often mastered by someone who specializes in the vinyl and is rather niche, they have full freedom to make it sound as good as it ever will be. That's also one reason why s…

A really weird side effect of this is that there are "objective" tools for comparing the dynamic range of different releases.[1] Vinyl releases will consistently measure much better and have "nicer" looking waveforms, even if they were mastered identically.[2]

[1] http://dr.loudness-war.info/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-AE9dL5FG8

Re: The Ghost in the MP3 (2014)

#43

Post by kruxigt »

toast0 wrote: post #23
hctaw wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lossless is only useful as an archival or intermediary format during production/recording where you can't tolerate lossy encoding. For listening purposes lossy codecs are all capable of being perceptually lossless for trained or untrained listeners, including MP3. MP3 gets a bad rap because low bitrate mp3 does sound awful. 320kbps or higher is sufficient for 99% of listeners, including audiophiles. Most listeners ca…

> MP3 gets a bad rap because low bitrate mp3 does sound awful. It's also the case that MP3 encoders got better over time, and if you're considering the sound of a 128kbps (or 96kbps) MP3 encoded by the Fraunhofer encoder you got from IRC in the late 90s; it's just not going to be good.

Though it sounden incredible then, compared to the blip blop sounds we were used to.

Re: The Ghost in the MP3 (2014)

#44

Post by vestrigi »

tomcooks wrote: post #21

There's a music album, Most Beautiful Design by Bienoise (cited in the PHD of the author of the site as a great example of how to work with MP3 compression artifacts and glitches) that is made of heavily compressed mp3s so that it sounds great while still fitting in a standard 1.44mb floppy. https://forceincmilleplateaux.bandcamp.com/album/most-beauti...

Ironically you can get the album as uncompressed FLAC files.

Re: The Ghost in the MP3 (2014)

#46

Post by schwartzworld »

dbatten wrote: post #13
seanalexander wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't like the distortion that 128k mp3 introduces, but I imagine that in years to come it'll become a fetish for certain types of audiophile This hasn't happened in almost 30 years of mp3s being a household format. The only feeling low resolution media evokes is frustration.

I think the implication was that, once mp3 is no longer a household format, there will be a certain type of person who feels a nostalgia for the "sound" of mp3s, maybe even advocating that it was "better" in some way than the sound of whatever comes next... This is basically what's happened with vinyl records at this point, right? People have a nostalgia for their sound, even though by any scientific or technical mea…

This is a reasonable take.

I'd never deliberately add tape hiss to a track, but when I hear a song with that hiss it just takes me back.

Re: The Ghost in the MP3 (2014)

#47

Post by layoutIfNeeded »

KaiserPro wrote: post #4

one interesting artifact of MP3s in pop music is that symbols are transformed from a clean Crashhhhhhhhhhh, to a sound like a dog slurping water. However like Jpeg this is a tradeoff that we are used to. in the same way that tape has frequency inbalance, records just sound shit (sorry I know you like it, but they really don't sound better. they are great for evoking a feeling, but not for fidelity. Its lomo but for s…

https://xkcd.com/598/

Re: The Ghost in the MP3 (2014)

#48

Post by layoutIfNeeded »

rubatuga wrote: post #24
tomcooks wrote: post #21

There's a music album, Most Beautiful Design by Bienoise (cited in the PHD of the author of the site as a great example of how to work with MP3 compression artifacts and glitches) that is made of heavily compressed mp3s so that it sounds great while still fitting in a standard 1.44mb floppy. https://forceincmilleplateaux.bandcamp.com/album/most-beauti...

Um, that sounds absolutely horrible.

Well, it’s an acquired taste... But that’s glitch music for you ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: The Ghost in the MP3 (2014)

#49

Post by peter_d_sherman »

"Phase Estimation" -- is my key phrase; my key takeaway -- from this article...

Using that as a starting point, I found this:

https://web.stanford.edu/~yzliao/pub/master_thesis.pdf

>"The estimation of the frequency and phase of a complex exponential in additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) is a fundamental and well-studied problem in signal processing and communications. Its numerous applications include carrier recovery in a communication system [1], determination of the object position in radar and sonar systems [2, 3], estimation of the heart rate of a fetus in biomedicine [4], and carrier synchronization in a distributed beamforming system [5]. Regardless of the application, poor estimation can lead to disastrous results. For example, in communication system, with the poor carrier frequency estimate, the down-converter may not be able to demodulate the passband signal to baseband [1]. In the smart antenna system and speech processing system, a poor phase estimator may cause the system to fail to identify the direction of arrival of the signal [6, 7]."

Re: The Ghost in the MP3 (2014)

#50

Post by p1mrx »

8bitsrule wrote: post #2

"I am planning a series of related compositions, constructed first from the other songs involved in the listening tests, but then probing the space of MP3 compression in different ways, attempting to highlight even more explicitly the filtering effect of this codec.... Composing with these sounds and injecting them back into contemporary listening spaces is one possible act of resistance, one available mode of cultur…

There is a vast array of electronic music out there, that sounds nothing like traditional musical instruments. I don't know what techniques artists are using to produce these sounds, but why would you assume that they're not exploring timbre space effectively?
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