How To Get The Best Quality Out Of Your Digital MP3 Player

Whether you are purchasing your music online or copying from your own personal CDs, records or tapes, there are three things to keep in mind – the bitrate, the storage capacity of your Digital MP3 player, and the playback quality of your player and headphones.

What is a bitrate?

The bitrate is the average amount of data required per second of music. This determines the audio resolution of an MP3 music file. The higher the number of kilobytes per second (kbit/s), the closer in sound quality the MP3 is to the original source - and the larger the file size. The bitrate you use when compressing your Digital MP3 player files depends on the quality you want and the space you have to store it. An MP3 digital file created using the mid-range bitrate setting of 138 kbit/s creates a file that is about 1/10th the size of the original CD.

When compressing audio, the extremely high and low frequencies get discarded -- even with just minimal compression. Although considered inaudible, these frequencies reinforce harmonic frequencies that "shade" the sound, giving it fullness and presence. The more you compress, the more you diminish the differences between loud and soft passages and this may decrease the music's dramatic impact. Extreme compression - down to 64 kbps and lower — can completely flatten the music, making it harsh and muddy. By contrast, MP3 files of 192 kbps, 256 kbps or greater preserve most of the sonic information of the original WAV file. Acoustic instruments tend to keep their natural warmth at these resolutions, and electronic instruments sound fuller while retaining their punch.

Digital MP3 player bitrates provide the following quality results:

• 32 kbit/s is equal to medium wave of AM qualify
• 96 kbit/s is equal to FM quality
• 128-160 kbit/s is the standard bitrate most often used for its quality relative to file size.
• 192 kbit/s is digital audio broadcasting quality and is becoming the standard bitrate for MP3 music. However, not everyone has the ability to discern this difference in audio quality.
• 224-320 kbit/s – near CD quality. The audio is nearly indistinguishable for most CDs.

Which compression rate is right for you?

For most people, music compressed at 128 kbit/s sounds pretty good and even a small 1-gigabyte portable player such as the Sansa® Clip™ can hold about 32 hours of 128 kbit/s MP3s, or roughly 480 songs – assuming the songs are about four minutes in length.

For this reason, most Internet download sites offer their songs at 128 kbit/s, though some may also offer the same songs at 256 kbit/s. MP3 files can be encoded from your CDs through a tool like dbpowerAMP (or another encoder of your choice) with the different bit rate and different encoding. Start from 96kbps up to 128kbps, they combine reasonable playback quality with pretty good compression (giving you room for more tracks). 44.1kHz is usually the default setting in most MP3 converters. Other sample rates may cause the sound to play slower or faster.

For help in converting your vinyl records or cassette tapes to MP3 files, there are a variety help tools available. http://www.andybrain.com/archive/convert-cassette-to-cd-digital.htm
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/?lang=en

Storage Capacity and Playback Quality for your Digital MP3 player

A higher bitrate may mean better quality, but you also need an advanced MP3 player with state-of-the-art headphones to hear the quality. It doesn't help to compress music to 224 kbit/s (near cd quality) and listen with low-end equipment that can't replicate the sound quality and bass response. So don't skimp on headphones!

All Sansa® MP3 players including the Sansa® e200™ and Sansa® Fuze™ deliver outstanding sound play back and classic multimedia functionality. They are available in 1GB, 2GB, 4GB, 6GB and 8GB and can hold anywhere from 480 to 15,000 songs – depending on the compression. Sansa® MP3 flash players provide external storage capacity. You can easily expand their storage capacities with either SD cards or SD™ micro expansion cards. You can keep separate SD cards to store different types of music. This allows you to easily keep things organized plus provides room for larger, higher bitrate files allowing you to listen to your favorite music with no loss in audio quality!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_level_compression
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_rate
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constant_bitrate