Keith G wrote:
Seeing Stimpy's post where he mentions 320 Kbit MP3s has got me
wondering.....

I recently re-recorded my 'Top 20' CDs/CD rips at 256 Kbit due to now
having the space to be able to do it and they sound absolutely fine -
good enough to fool the 'Golden Ears Brigade' representative,
hereabouts, a few nights ago, as per my recent post.

I seem to remember someone somewhere saying that the highest rate
MP3s can be spitchy and wonder if anyone here can confirm or deny
this? I haven't heard any such thing myself on the 320s I've tried,
but I don't want to put a lot of effort into 'upping the rate' if
there's a possibility I'll regret it in the future. (I also can't
hear much difference myself, but that means nothing....!! ;-)

All I can say is I listened very carefully to various encoding methods and
bitrates before deciding on 320kbps MP3 18 months or so back. If I'd have
heard anything specifically negative about 320 I'd have used 256. Not quite
sure what you mean by 'spitchy' but I don't hear anything unwelcome in any
of my 320s. I did think of sticking with 'raw' WAV but I genuinely
couldn't tell the difference between a selction of WAV rips and 320kbps MP3s
of the same CDs.

Having said all that there was, to me, virtually no audible difference
between 256 and 320kbps MP3. I went with 320 merely because I thought it
made sense to go with the highest bit rate I could. After all, disk space
is all but free these days and will only get cheaper


Also - playing MP3s from a computer's hard drive - does this
remove/reduce any problems from Jitter? Where is the sound coming
from when you play an MP3 thus - is it read into RAM entirely, if so
I would have thought would remove the possibility of jitter, but
would jitter have been already recorded into the MP3??? Is there any
possibility of jitter being 'ironed into' a recording and then
getting 'jittered again' when it's played??

(Although, once again, I can't say I've ever heard 'Jitter' myself -
I'm confused and it, er, gives me the jitters...!!??!! :-)

For what it's worth, as of today I've got around 28,000 tracks on my MP3
server - almost all ripped from original CDs at 320 or bootlegs with a known
providence - and I don't notice any unwelcome artifacts or effects.

Like Keith, I'm not sure what 'jitter' is supposed to be so maybe I wouldn't
notice it even if I heard it :-) Ultimately, it sounds fine to me and
that's all that matters really!