Newbie Calling - any where to get help in improving bit rates on audio

[knowyourpast]

Greetings - I have found recently that the quality of my downloaded (but particularly those folders I seed) music can be improved if I alter the bit rate . How do I do this? Is there a guide to help newbies with this topic?

[Case]

You can only improve the quality of music by altering the bitrate, if you create the audio file yourself from a higher quality source. There is no gain in making the bitrate higher from a source file with a low bitrate. Even worse: each lossy conversion will degrade the quality a bit.

[tomlee59]

Think about it this way: More bits, more information (potentially), so higher bitrates can (but don't necessarily) provide higher quality.

That's a gross simplification, but it's more true than false.

Bitrates aren't the only factor. The particular method used to compress the audio also makes a difference because these methods use different strategies to discard information that is hopefully not too audible. Uncompressed CD audio is about 1.4megabits per second. MP3 manages similar subjective quality at a tenth of that rate (meaning the filesize is a tenth as large). MP2 needs 50-100% higher bitrate to achieve similar quality. But for a given compression standard, higher bitrates generally permit higher quality. Diminishing returns will kick in at some point, meaning that further increases in bitrates will increase quality only negligibly. That's why MP3 is generally encoded at between 128 and 256kb/s.

Now, if you're not the one doing the encoding (e.g., you just downloaded some music already compressed by someone else), there's essentially nothing you can do if you don't like the quality. The bitrate is set during the encoding process, so you can't alter it.

If the quality is poor for reasons other than bitrate (such as overload, background noise, lousy acoustics), then some improvement may be possible with post-processing software. But it really is a source problem you're talking about.