MP3: The Definitive Guide

Preface

This book has a simple premise: People want to build MP3 collections of the music they like and respect. To do justice to that music requires that the MP3 files constituting a personal music collection be of a high audio quality. But MP3 is generally considered to be a convenience format, not an audiophile format—its main advantages are its flexibility and its portability.

While the press generally refers to MP3 audio as being “near CD quality,” audiophiles often point to anomalies in the fidelity of the typical MP3 download. But there’s a big difference between the average MP3 file downloaded from the Internet and a file you encode yourself, at a decent bitrate, from your own source material, using the encoder you feel yields the highest quality. MP3 is very much capable of achieving CD quality—you just have to pay a little attention to the variables. As I began to research the MP3 scene in earnest, I found that only a small fraction of available resources were paying close attention to MP3 quality issues. As a hobbyist audiophile, I found this dissatisfying, and felt that it was important to provide readers with a “no-compromise” approach to MP3—you can have your convenience factors and a quality audio experience at the same time.

While this book provides plenty of introductory material that will coach any reader through the basic mechanics of MPEG audio, it puts quite a bit of emphasis on fidelity issues, in addition to some of the peripheral topics not covered in depth ...