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Band-in-a-Box for Windows
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Here is a table that I put together showing how the world listens to music these days. It compares what is available in BIAB standard and audiophile versions to how the world listens. Because the quality of the music cannot be artificially increased from its source but can be compressed from a source with minimal artifacts, it opens the question of whether the standard offering of BIAB can or should increase its compressed bit rate to better match where the majority of the world is listing to music. Of course, there are many tradeoffs in this discussion such as size of the files, hard drives that they have to ship to you versus the current 128K bit rate of the .wma file. If the standard version is increased to at least 160 kbps to 256 kbps it would put it in the ballpark of where the majority of the world listens to music. ` Yes, there are many codecs and lossless discussions, but even MS wma 8-10 offers all the way up to a professional quality sound so it's just a matter of what is the best right size for PGM and the current majority of the music listening. Your thoughts? ![[Linked Image from i.postimg.cc]](https://i.postimg.cc/50pb5cvx/Music-Bitrates.png)
Studio One (latest version), Win 11 23H2 , i9 -10940X 3.3 GHz, 32GB Mem, a 4K 40" monitor, PreSonus Studio Live III Console as interface/controller. secondarily test on Reaper, Cakewalk, and S1 on Surface Pro 3 Win 10 (latest versions).
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Band-in-a-Box for Windows
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Hmm ... potential audio war  FWIW, here are my thoughts; I'm sure others will differ. Background: I'm not absolutely certain when I did this, but 2009 looks likely when I was mid-fifties so my hearing would already have been fading. I compared MP3, Ogg Vorbis and FLAC, the first two at several bit rates, looking for the "indistinguishable from the CD". 128kbps didn't do it. 160kbps on MP3 seemed marginal ... mostly OK with a few "Oh" moments. 160kbps on Ogg was better. Faster bit rates were fine for me. With my codec, decompressed FLAC was binary identical to the source. If I did that again, I'd now use FLAC or similar, but I'm not sure how that would fit with PGM's marketing. Back then I settled on Ogg Vorbis 44.1k and 160kbps. I think there are good arguments for going to 48k sampling as I think resampling down should be better then resampling up. Once inside the software itself, there's then the tradeoff between sample-rate plus sample depth and the amount of CPU time needed to process the data. My temptation in that case is to say stick with 48k sampling and 32-bit floating point and don't get carried away with more, because that will just hit the number of tracks and number of plug-ins. Using graphics cards as the engine might recalibrate that. All caveats apply, YMMV. Edit .. Just an FYI aside: The reason I compared only MP3, Ogg Vorbis and FLAC, not WMA, is that as a Linux user there was no WMA. There are also, of course, more formats available today than there were 15 years ago.
Last edited by Gordon Scott; 03/23/24 02:34 PM. Reason: FYI addendum.
Jazz relative beginner, starting at a much older age than was helpful.
AVL:MXE Linux; Windows 11
BIAB2025 Audiophile, a bunch of other software.
Kawai MP6, Ui24R, Focusrite Saffire Pro40 and Scarletts
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Band-in-a-Box for Windows
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I’m glad you brought this up. We have had lots of discussions about this but not in a while.
Nice chart. I question one thing in your chart. In my opinion, a rate of 128 kbps is not the same audio quality in an MP3 as it is in a WMA. As I wrote many years ago in the first sticky post in the Tips & Tricks Forum, the BIAB WMA files at 128 sound to me like an MP3 running at 160 to 192. I would have placed the ‘Standard’ entry in the BIAB column at the 160 row. Plus, some of the BIAB sounds are mono, which I think reduces the artifacts a bit.
You are correct about file sizes being bigger the better the quality gets. The discussions we’ve had on possibly downloading the audiophile version always include the suggestion to use lossless compression. I only use 320 for an MP3, and I switched to FLAC for most uses a few years back.
Avoiding yet another hard drive each year would be nice, especially for the folks in Europe paying the VAT. And if the audiophile version with compression still couldn’t be made small enough for most to download, perhaps it could ship just the updated or new files on some form of flash drive. Whatever applies to the discussion of making the audiophile size smaller should be useful for the regular version at some improved higher rate.
BIAB 2025 Win Audiophile. Software: Studio One 7 Pro, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Presonus 192 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Slate VSX, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.
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Band-in-a-Box for Windows
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Get rid of wma and have a crossplatform compressed format.
For Audiophile I showed wavpack to be an alternative to give 24bit 48khz at a lot smaller size than wav/aiff but no quality loss and allows multichannel encoding.
This is all from years n years ago, 24/48 it's a no brainer for higher quality, but it's an old argument like not needing 64bit because we have JBridge.
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Band-in-a-Box for Windows
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Matt, the wma files in BIAB show as 128 kbps.
I was generally cataloging it to make the point. I only mentioned MP3 to remind people of what was used in the 90s.
I have read that AAC codec produce a better quality than MP3 codecs for the same bit rate but have not seen the same for wma vs mp3. At that bit rate they would be approximately the same.
The real point of this thread is there a desire to get the minimal quality up to the current streaming quality on the Internet? This can be done with many different codecs today.
Musocity
You're driving a different point and I think most would agree that there are more modern ways to get at least CD quality for the audio file version and this would allow PGM to release on a high quality on smaller drives.
P.S. I was surprises to find out the world is listening to something less than CD quality of the 80s.
Studio One (latest version), Win 11 23H2 , i9 -10940X 3.3 GHz, 32GB Mem, a 4K 40" monitor, PreSonus Studio Live III Console as interface/controller. secondarily test on Reaper, Cakewalk, and S1 on Surface Pro 3 Win 10 (latest versions).
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Band-in-a-Box for Windows
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I could spend time researching this but it’s no point because I completely agree with you that the audio quality for the regular version of BIAB (for Windows), wherever you chart it, should be improved.
BIAB 2025 Win Audiophile. Software: Studio One 7 Pro, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Presonus 192 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Slate VSX, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.
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