How To
Playing Compressed Sound on a Home Stereo
Question
I know that you can convert MP3s into WAVs and AIFFs, but they are both very large formats. I am wondering whether there are any other formats that you can convert MP3s into, which are more compressed but are still playable in most home stereos.
Answer
The AIFF file format supports several compression algorithms. They are all lossy. Your choices are MACE, Law, and IMA. AIFF files compressed with these compressors will play back fine on any computer or home stereo. The size of the files will be significantly reduced, but their sound quality will be adversely affected. You will have to play around to see if you are willing to accept the compromise. You can compress an AIFF file using one of these algorithms with a program like SoundEdit 16 from Macromedia, or using QuickTime Player under QuickTime Pro (you will need to upgrade if you are using the free version of QuickTime).
In my opinion it makes more sense to just burn out the MP3s directly to an audio CD using Toast 4.x. This will result in a CD that is playable on a home stereo, and the sound quality will be no worse than the MP3 source file, although you will not be able to fit as many songs on the CD as if you converted and compressed the AIFF files beforehand. Toast 4.x converts MP3 to AIFF on the fly but it does not offer the option to compress the AIFF files because that is too processor intensive to do on the fly and would interrupt the CD burning process.
Compressing AIFF files beforehand is time consuming. You can use a program like Cleaner from Terran Interactive to batch convert/compress files, but otherwise you have to baby-sit the computer and do it file by file. I’m lazy and would rather have more CDs with higher quality sound that required less of my time and energy to generate, than fewer with poorer quality sound.
A home stereo cannot play AIFF files that have been compressed using a proprietary or third party compression algorithm (or codec); it can only play AIFFs compressed using the algorithms that are part of the AIFF definition (MACE, Law, IMA, etc.). Files compressed using these algorithms do not need special software to be played because they do not fundamentally alter the file format; they simply tweak the dynamic range and save space in clever ways.
Proprietary algorithms (such as QDesign Music 2, which comes with QuickTime Pro, and is a remarkable compression technology) work their magic by way of far more sophisticated and successful methods, but in order to play the files you need a program that can read the new, modified, data. So using QDesign as an example, you would need to play the compressed files on a computer with QuickTime Pro (or the QDesign codec) installed, and naturally your CD player could not play a CD full of QDesign compressed AIFF files. In this sense they are no different than MP3s.
No matter what compression algorithm you use on the AIFF files in question, you are compressing the data for the second time (first time was with MP3), and that is always going to wreck the sound quality of your recording.
Copyright © 2001 Evan Trent,
etrent@atpm.com.
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Reader Comments (31)
TJ
So, how about it, Steve? You want to sell products to the millions of Wintel users. Apple would convert them all with a stylish 60-watt digital receiver that would allow iTunes, Quicktime, and everything else to integrate with my other consumer electronics. I'd pay $400-500 for one.
--Ev
Nick D.
Please note that the drawback of doing this is that the MP3 disc will not play in many home CD audio players—only computers and some of the newer CD players that will read MP3 discs. In anticipation of a follow-up question, I will go ahead and answer that if you have one of the less recent CD players in your stereo that does not read MP3 discs, then you will not be able to use it to play a disc with 10 hours of music on it. It will only play the 74- or 80-minute standard audio discs.
The input that I'll add is to find out the age of the car stereo. Anything sold in recent years should have no problem with CD-Rs, but it's also been demonstrated that some of the earlier car CD players don't do well with CD-Rs of any brand or burn speed.
There's one idea that popped in my head, but I'm sure it's not the issue because Dave said he has been able to play a little bit of some CDs. But just to cover all the bases, here's what I wondered: I take for granted that you're not burning MP3 discs and it just happens that your home CD system can play them (some of the newest systems can) and your car player cannot.
But, having learned that I could possibly have a lot more tracks on a single CD using the ISO 9660 format, my car stereo does not play any sound.
Please, please help. Thanks.
What brand/model is your player?
If your existing unit does not support MP3 discs (have you tried it?) you'll need to contact the manufacturer of the particular device in your car. It's unlikely that if it has any capability of playing MP3 discs that it would come disabled. Putting in an aftermarket CD/stereo is probably the only option.
A bitrate changer can be found by typing "bitrate changer" in to Google.
I use this for embedding MP3 disguised as Wav files in to Powerpoint presentations.
This is needed for emailing.
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