Downloaded songs sound quality?

[Shell]

I have a question. Are songs you buy from music services compressed? How do they compare to the CD version as far as sound quality. I have a subscription to Yahoo music engine and was going to buy a song for $0.79, but wanted to know if the cd version would be better sq.

Thanks

[cmy330go]

I have a question. Are songs you buy from music services compressed? How do they compare to the CD version as far as sound quality. I have a subscription to Yahoo music engine and was going to buy a song for $0.79, but wanted to know if the cd version would be better sq.

Thanks

Yes any MP3s, AAC, or WMA files are compressed and therefore will not sound as good as cd. However if you are just listening on a cheap MP3 player or on crappy computer speakers you may not hear the difference.

[Shell]

Thanks CMY,
I have my computer networked to my whole house system. But I also have a high end system in my family room that I wanted to burn a CD of bought songs to listen to. I do not believe the songs you download from a music service are MP3. I am not sure about the other formats. Not surprising the service does not tell you what format the songs are.

[michael_w]

Songs directly off a cd will be about 1411 kb/s... what you download will probably be 128, 192 or around 224. They will sound worse but it depens what you play them with. I say if you're going to spend money on music don't pay to download it and just get the cd.

[Shell]

Point taken MW, unfortunately I only like one song on a couple of the CDs, but do not want to lose sq. So I will buy the CDs.

This raises another question, when I burn a CD of songs from a CD I own, is the sound quality on the burned CD the same as the original?

[michael_w]

It depends how you rip them to your computer. The songs will be no better quality than the downloaded ones if you rip them at a bad bitrate.

You can theoretically rip them at near perfect cd quality using this program - EAC (link) (http://www.exactaudiocopy.org/). It works quite nicely but you do have to keep in mind that if you want to keep the songs on your computer they'll hog a lot of space when you rip them like that. An single average cd will take around 550mb of space when you don't compress it compared to say 70mb a cd if they were at 192kb/s. (depends how many and long the songs are on the cd)

[polkatese]

The bit rate that I found to be close to original CD quality when you need to rip song is 320 for MP3. Of course, if the original is lousy, then you won't get any better. Each song is typically uses 11mb at this rate.

[PolkThug]

I buy all of my music from [PM for details]. You can pick whatever format or compression you want. I usually go with 320 mp3's, which average about 22 cents a song. You can go with higher quality, but it costs more, they charge by bandwidth and not by song.

[cfrizz]

I haven't noticed any real difference in the songs that I have downloaded online from ones that I have copied & burned from the original disk. You can just as easily have a poorly recorded cd as the services can have a poor copy.

At just .79, download them & find out for yourself.

It really is a waste to buy a whole cd when all that is worth keeping on it is a couple of songs.

[Shell]

Thanks everyone! This is why I love this site, I get great informative feedback.

[jcaut]

I won't bother to comment on the sound quality of comressed music, since I think you've already gotten answers that you are satisfied with. On ripping music from CD's you own to your computer: As mentioned, EAC does a great job, if properly configured. You can rip .wav files and then compress with one of the lossless codecs like Monkey's Audio (.ape) or FLAC. I have been unable to detect any loss of sound quality (there's not supposed to be any, since it's lossless) and you'll generally be able to get to about 50-60% of the original file size. That's pretty significant space-savings, if you like to store lots of high-quality music on your computer. I've "backed-up" several of my CD's this way. There are plug-ins to play these lossless-compressed files with Winamp, Foobar.. most anything you prefer to use. You can read more about it at http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?act=idx

Jason

[cfrizz]

I use WMA @ 128 kbs & it does just fine! No need for any other program.

[dudeinaroom]

their is also wma lossless, but if you reall worried about sq, rip the songs you want (if you have, or know some one who will borrow you the cd) to wav format, and the burn it to cd, no compression, no loss. If you want to keep it on your computer and are worried about disk space I personally like flac, you could also try ape, or even wma lossless

[audiobliss]

I would second EAC, as that's what I used to use (I don't listen to music off my computer much anymore, more due to just the way things go than not being happy with it). I've also played with WMA VBR and WMA Lossless, though FLAC and Ogg supposedly good lossless formats you might want to play around with.

And I recommend foobar2000 for playback, as it will play just about any format.