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Re: What mp3 quality do you want?

Messages in this topic: 35 View All
eriatarkaeJul 22, 2009
 

 
Fred:

> I don't know the technicals of how it works, but quality is fine for what I need. Any thoughts would be apprecaited.

The quality is certainly sufficient for listening to, and easily beats analogue recordings - but it still suffers from the few problems that any other method suffers from. It does appear to have a rather nice GUI though, which get_iplayer could really do with.

I'm fairly sure this isn't optimal though.

> And while we are talking about downloads, the skipscreen plugin for Firefox is worth checking out, for dealing with those pesky countdown timers on certain sites. ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/11243 )

Now this is very useful indeed - thanks very much for the tipoff!

Charles:

> If you edit get_iplayer in a text editor to add "-V 2" to the lameopts argument, the output should be pretty close to ideal as far as mp3 files go.

Definitely sounds like the right thing to do, but unfortunately I can't work out how to. Any ideas what to edit to achieve this?

> The next question -- since most media players support .aac -- is

why not just keep the raw, original .aac files and avoiding the
aac->mp3 transcode step. If we can find a utility to trim the
extra six minutes off the ends, IMO that would be the Right Thing.

There are a few caveats to this. Firstly, the raw .aac files don't appear to play in iTunes (Quicktime only), and changing the extension doesn't help either. This is a huge problem for me, as iTunes is my central storage for all things JAM. Secondly, I'm fairly sure that .aac is not a suitable format for most people's usual use patterns - most mp3 players can't play it, and car stereos don't usually play it either.

As far as utilities go, they are not freeware. There's Quicktime Pro or, for Macs, Fission. Quicktime Pro is useful, because if you trim to the selection (which is not immediately obvious, but there's a selection ruler across the bottom) and save as an .mp4, then that will play in iTunes. Fission - I have no idea, I'm on XP.

I'll await further questions etc.

Robert

 
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