Author Topic: Help with sound-Amazon purchases  (Read 2937 times)

DuVtrell

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I'm not an audiophile so can someone help me? When I transfer amazon purchases to musicbee the songs get a raspy quality to it.....it's not clear. Sorry, I don't know how I can describe it any further. When I rip the same songs from the album the sound is fine. I tried everything but can't figure it out. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

CritterMan

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Isn't Amazon still doing MP3 only? Are you sure you're not an audiophile?   ::)
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DuVtrell

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Not at all. Believe me, anyone would know the sound is unlistenable. It doesn't happen to every album that is transferred either.

frankz

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Unless you're altering the files in some way, the Amazon files shouldn't sound any different in MusicBee than they do in other programs.  

Without knowing your process for "transferring amazon purchases to musicbee" there's really no way anyone can diagnose what's going on.  Obviously, "raspy" sounding music is not expected behavior.

I'm wondering what you expected us to be able to tell you with the information you've provided us.  It's not like there's a "inject raspy sound" setting that we can advise you to turn off.

What I'm saying here is that we need to know how you're doing what you're doing in order to begin to try to figure out what's going wrong.  How are you "transferring the purchases to musicbee"? You said you "tried everything."  What did you try.

sveakul

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Isn't Amazon still doing MP3 only? Are you sure you're not an audiophile?   ::)

so the man says with a gear list like that ;) !

frankz

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I actually just got the Dayton SUB-1000 to be more like Critterman.

(That's actually not why, but seeing it in his profile afterwards makes me feel like I chose wisely)

CritterMan

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DuVtrell, can you upload one of the files to a cloud drive and post the link here? That way we can see if there is anything different about them and see if we can reproduce your results.


I actually just got the Dayton SUB-1000 to be more like Critterman.

No good can come from this  ;D
Home Desk ~ MB 3.3 Portable • Questyle CMA400i (ASIO) • Sennheiser HD 660S (balanced) / Audeze EL-8 Closed Back / Fostex TR-X00 Ebony • Teac AI-101DA • Jamo C93 + Dayton Audio SUB-1000
Work Desk ~ MB 3.3 Portable / Tidal • SMSL SU-8 v2 • Nobsound NS-05P • THX AAA 789 • Sennheiser HD 58X (balanced)
OTG ~ FiiO M11 • Audiofly AF180 / B&O H6

cynflux

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I thought I read that the highest bitrate that Amazon provides is 256 kbps VBR.



DuVtrell

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I figured it out. The equalizer was heavily distorting the songs sound quality. I set it to auto select by genre and when I set it to none again the sound was fine. The song where it was most apparent was "Storms" by Wolf Alice. Why it affected some songs/albums and not others I do not know.

Does Flac generally provide better sound quality than mp3's or AAC's? I don't know the difference between any of these file formats.

Thanks.

Love Musicbee.
Last Edit: March 28, 2018, 11:56:27 PM by DuVtrell

CritterMan

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Does Flac generally provide better sound quality than mp3's or AAC's? I don't know the difference between any of these file formats.

You've asked a big question, but I'll try to give a succinct answer.

MP3 and AAC have excellent compression for reducing the size of the files. FLAC has a fair compression ratio and thus the files sizes are larger reducing the number of tracks that can fit on a given storage device.

MP3 and AAC are "lossy" formats. In a nutshell, they give up precision to reduce file size. There are many opinions on what you really lose, but there are compression artifacts present in some tracks, often heard as clicks or chirps.

FLAC is a "lossless" format. The compressed information is 100% recovered during playback. It's the same quality and contains all the same information as an uncompressed file, but does not take up as much space.

To put it another way, MP3 is like JPG in the way that FLAC is like PNG. I hope that helps.
Home Desk ~ MB 3.3 Portable • Questyle CMA400i (ASIO) • Sennheiser HD 660S (balanced) / Audeze EL-8 Closed Back / Fostex TR-X00 Ebony • Teac AI-101DA • Jamo C93 + Dayton Audio SUB-1000
Work Desk ~ MB 3.3 Portable / Tidal • SMSL SU-8 v2 • Nobsound NS-05P • THX AAA 789 • Sennheiser HD 58X (balanced)
OTG ~ FiiO M11 • Audiofly AF180 / B&O H6

DuVtrell

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Ah, Thank you. Looks like I'll stick to MP3's as I do have a ton of music.

sveakul

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Ah, Thank you. Looks like I'll stick to MP3's as I do have a ton of music.

I'm not trying to be difficult, but since you said you didn't really know the difference between file formats (until CritterMan's excellent explanation), just wanted to send the heads-up that there are mp3's and there are mp3's.  You really want to avoid lower bitrates and those not taking advantage of the newest vbr technique if possible, for the best sound quality.  The LAME encoding mode of VBR V0 is just about perfect in producing transparent audio while maintaining decent file sizes, producing encodes varying between 240-290 kbps (rough estimate).  I'm "just sayin'", avoid the legion of 128kbps mp3's if at all possible.  And of course, you would never want to re-encode upwards from an already lossy source, so if all you have available/can obtain is a 128 copy keep it as-is.  The Amazon stuff (mostly 256 VBR like cynflux mentioned) has been fine for me although I try to use Bandcamp if I can, who offer VBR V0 mp3 (even FLAC and WAV) for their stuff.

Good deal on locating the source of that "raspy" sound.  Wrong equalizer or limiter/compressor settings will ding you every time.

captain_paranoia

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Ah, Thank you. Looks like I'll stick to MP3's as I do have a ton of music.

Hard disks are cheap. Really cheap. If you are ripping CDs, rip to lossless FLAC, and retain the CD quality sound.

Ripping to a lossy format can never achieve the CD quality sound; the detail is gone, never to be recovered. Lossy playback is done by reconstructing an approximation of the original file.

If you need to reduce file size for a portable device, transcode your FLACs to a parallel directory. But make sure you keep the FLACs.

Of course, you mentioned Amazon purchases, so ripping may not be relevant... And FLAC downloads are likely to cost more than MP3 (because they're better quality...). If Amazon even offers lossless downloads; I don't think it does.

Freddy Barker

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Ripping to a lossy format can never achieve the CD quality sound; the detail is gone, never to be recovered.

This much is very true, although there is always debate as to what details are actually lost in real terms with sound quality.
I'm fine with 256kb AAC.
If you're way, way over 21 as I am, and have been to hundreds of electric guitar rock band concerts where ears have taken a beating, then SQ not so noticeable, don't get to hung up over it as many CD's sound terrible anyway, just try to enjoy the music..
Best Regards; Freddy  :D

captain_paranoia

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If you're way, way over 21 as I am, and have been to hundreds of electric guitar rock band concerts where ears have taken a beating, then SQ not so noticeable, don't get to hung up over it as many CD's sound terrible anyway, just try to enjoy the music..

I am also way over 21.
I have also seen many rock bands (including Iron Maiden, Saxon, Uriah Heap, UFO, etc, at small venues, very close to the front).
I have tinnitus (caused by an infection).

I can still easily detect the difference between LAME VBR0 MP3 and FLAC.
I try to avoid the terrible CDs...

Obviously, it's a personal choice. But really, a 2TB HDD costs less than £50 these days.