Bit(es) Rat(es)

BigD-Bluez

Just tossing this out out of frustration at the redistribution job being done to the Concord family of labels over there at eMu, because these changes so totally screw with Lists, SFL, Download History, eliminate re-download capability, blah blah blah, and it is held forth that it will be worth it for better bitrates. Problem - the two songs I tried out of curiosity came in at only 195 and 219 kbps, not even the promised 256. They are encoded with Fraunhofer, rather than LAME. Can any of the cognoscenti out there explain if this is an improvement that somehow offsets the marginal increase of kbps of these tracks?

thomnottom

Then they most likely were delivered at the proper bitrate, but eMusic phrased it incorrectly. This is the result of a fairly common misunderstanding of VBR. He mistakenly called it 256kbps VBR, but that setting doesn't actually exist. It is a reference to V0 VBR.

But VBR encoding does not aim for a specific average bitrate - that was ABR. Instead, VBR encoding aims for a particular quality. So a V0 encoded file can have a very low bitrate if the source material doesn't need anymore - I have at least one that registers at 128kbps.

V0 is nice because it still keeps the file size down from the bloat of 256 or 320 CBR without any real loss in quality - but it's not likely that you would notice any difference between V0 and V2, either. In other words, it's a plus, but I wouldn't bother re-purchasing anything for it.

BigD-Bluez

And to be totally accurate, I got 2 songs from 2 albums that I had several other tracks from, so my comparision is against those, rather than a previous download of the same songs. I'm just pissed because the Concord/Fantasy/Pablo/Stax family is probably the leading group in my downloads by far, and it just screws things up when they do this kind of thing.

thomnottom

I'm still a little steamed because I realized it would cost me like 8 credits to redownload the 2 tracks from NEU!'s debut that I have as V4 encoding. Got Hallogallo and Negativland years ago, then the album disappeared and when it reappeared I got the rest of it (now V2). Figured it was worth 2 credits to upgrade those tracks, but since Hallogallo is just over 10 minutes it's album-only. Seriously annoying. We're talking 7 seconds here.