ZiNgA BuRgA Wrote:It's lossless.

... I know it's lossless. And I didn't mean anything negative from that previous post, I'm sure you know enough not to encode some lossy thing into lossless and hope for quality increases. It's about before you, rather than you.

I mean the source that the original encoder used, was that some good enough source to warrant lossless? Actually, considering it's some music track, most likely it is. Probably encoded directly from CD or something. So don't mind me, the post was kinda stupid.

It's just that I recently got into an argument with some anime encoder on this subject. He thinks encoding his thing lossless is pro when he got some random raw from somewhere, not .*ts direct cap, like a .mp4 raw already encoded and made lossy by someone else. So pretty much original » lossy » lossless = fail.

I was like "it's pointless to encode something that already is lossy into lossless". He's like "encoding it into lossy again just looses you even more quality, but lossless will at least keep what quality you have"... ... Well, if he doesn't want to loose any quality, then why doesn't he just directly copy the stream and skip all that encoding all together? Sure will save him space.

(This post was last modified: 16/11/2008 05:51 PM by Assassinator.)

Slushba132 Wrote:...what about up scaling in quality

You mean upsampling? Pretty pointless imo.

Theoretically, it should not increase the perceived quality of the audio at all. Unless you want to do filtering or something, but then again, you probably aren't going to be filtering your audio.

Compare to upsampling an image from 100x100 to 200x200, just makes a blurry larger image, doesn't really make it any "better". Only reason you'd do it is if you need it larger (requirement), or you think you can do a better job than the default upsize your image viewer or media player does, and that would involve filtering and other forms of processing.

(This post was last modified: 16/11/2008 06:02 PM by Assassinator.)

Slushba132 Wrote:so long story short, do everything right, perfect, and big the first time

Yeah, that would be best, if possible. :)

Like if you can get the big raw, get it rather than upsizing some small one.

Assassinator Wrote:

ZiNgA BuRgA Wrote:It's lossless.

... I know it's lossless. And I didn't mean anything negative from that previous post, I'm sure you know enough not to encode some lossy thing into lossless and hope for quality increases. It's about before you, rather than you.

I mean the source that the original encoder used, was that some good enough source to warrant lossless? Actually, considering it's some music track, most likely it is. Probably encoded directly from CD or something. So don't mind me, the post was kinda stupid.

Yeah, the source is lossless:
1) I got it as a CD image with an accompanying CUEsheet (not individual tracks)
2) It checks out against CDDB, meaning the hashes match

---

Anyway, here's the results (quite surprising):

(This post was last modified: 16/11/2008 10:23 PM by ZiNgA BuRgA.)

ZiNgA BuRgA Wrote:Anyway, here's the results (quite surprising):

A: MP3, 128kbps, Joint-stereo [LAME with -v0 switch]
B: WMA9 Std 96kbps [Windows Media Encoder, with 2-pass encoding]
C: LC-AAC 96kbps [NeroAAC]
D: <Original>
E: HE-AAC q0.25 (average bitrate=69kbps) [NeroAAC]

B was meant to be the obvious bad one - surprising most of you couldn't tell - if you're having trouble, focus on the sounds the symbols in the background make - WMA appears to be very bad at reproducing "sharp" sounds, especially those in the background.

lol i said that B was the worst, but it wasn't a very assuring assumption.
i guess I'm not that good at being able to tell though, with saying D is one of the worst