Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With tech stuff from how stuff Works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to the podcast. This is Jonathan Strickland, writer with how Stuff Works, and with me is editor and
percussionists extraordinaire Chris Pullett. Hey there, and we're gonna talk to you today a little bit about m P three's, specifically r MP three's destroying sound quality in the music business, in the world at large, and should we all throw our iPods in the garbage. Well, it's easy to say that the MP three is the number one most used audio format because you know, it's it's not everybody's. Well, it's easy to say, though there are tons of other ones. Um,
but MP three is by and large it. But you can't say, in my opinion that the MP three by itself is destroying music. There are a lot of other things that have gone up to this point. Well, yes, there's that, um but you know, the c D itself is already clipping a lot of a lot of the
frequencies that we normally hear. Now the human ear can hear between twenty and twenty thousand hurts basically, although you know there are there's some differences person in person, and apparently females can hear a little more frequency than than males. But uh, you know, the the CD started that because to fit a song on a CD or a whole album on a c D, artists UM artists and producers had to start compressing the music, and basically they're cutting
out frequencies that we can't hear. Well. An MP three D twenty eight, which is the standard kill a bits per second uh encoding for MP three's to fit the uh you know, the thousands of songs on our MP three players and a D kill a bits per second UM, and MP three cuts out a lot more frequency. UM. So you know that's that's a lot of what's going on here. But why would that be destroying music? Well,
it's interesting. You see, first of all, what the once you get when you compressed down to the MP three format is Yes, first of all, you you look at the frequencies that humans can't hear at all, and you're like, well, let's just throw those out because how could that possibly affect sound quality? Well, after that, you start looking at frequencies that you could hear, but you're not likely to hear because there are other frequencies being played at that
same moment that would cover it up. So let's say it was a really soft guitar part under a really loud drum part. You said, well, let's just get rid of the guitar part, because who's gonna hear it. And you start making more and more compromises like that, and
that eventually starts to affect sound quality. Well, they also start to may being being codex essentially, when you're when you're compressing down to MP three format, you start to cut out the high end and the low end of the frequencies, and so the song, while it may it may sound good enough for someone who wants, you know, a portable solution to to carrying music around, um, they
don't sound nearly as good as the original version would have. UM. And you can really tell this when you're using high end music equipment. If you're using crappy little speakers or headphones, you may not be able to tell the difference because the output's gonna be pretty lousy across the board. But if you're listening on really nice equipment, you'll be able to tell the difference between an MP three version of
a song and an uncompressed version of that song. Yeah, and as as a user, you have some control over this if you're if you're taking your CDs or vinyl albums or whatever else and encoding them into MP three's you can change the the bit rate, which is the amount of information essentially that the computer is using to uh encode the file. So you could, you know, crank
it all the way up to u kbps. Now that's going to make your MP three files that much more you're and take up that much more room on your MP three player, but you'll be able to get a lot more information in there. And um, you know, MP three is a lossy format, which means that you're already
losing a lot of information in there. You could use other formats, uh the one that comes to mind would be the Free Lossless Audio codec or flak UM, and that is a lossless format, but again, it carries a lot bigger file size because it has a lot more digital information in the file. And more importantly, to some people, it's not necessarily compatible with the equipment you have like an iPod like an iPod UM. So that's but Apple does have its own lossless UH file format as well,
UM that you can look into. But as for m P three's, you're gonna be dealing with a little bit of a reduction of sound quality. How much depends mainly upon the bit rate. But if you want to learn more about m P three's, check out our article on how MP three's work at how stuff works dot com for moralness and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com? Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcast and how stuff works dot com.
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