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posted by CoolHand on Monday May 15 2017, @03:42PM   Printer-friendly
from the pure-sound dept.

Vice Noisey reports on a musician who isolates MP3 artefacts by finding the differences between an MP3 and a lossless recording, then samples them to create his own music (N.B. the examples are hosted on Soundcloud; Javascript is needed to listen to them).

These days though, in our rush to listen to all music everywhere at all times, we often sacrifice these layers by listening to the most readily available streams or downloads, which are usually relatively crappy formats like MP3, AAC, or whatever the hell Grooveshark uses, which can sometimes sound like the recording of a song being through a coke can in a garden shed.

Often, we're losing out on a significant amount of what the artist intended, because when the original analog music is converted to one of these formats, certain layers of sound are lost in the digital compression. Translation: there's a lots of bits to your favourite albums that you may have never even heard.

Exploring this, is the Ghost in the MP3 project by doctoral music student Ryan Maguire from the University of Virginia's Center for Computer Music. He investigates these lost layers of sound, what they sound like when rescued, and then tries to make new music with them. For an example in his study, he took the layers of sound lost to compression from the acapella song "Tom's Diner" by Suzanne Vega, which was also the template song used by Karlheinz Brandenburg, the pioneer of the MP3, to test whether the compression of MP3s worked. You can hear the track he made from those bits below.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by butthurt on Monday May 15 2017, @11:53PM (1 child)

    by butthurt (6141) on Monday May 15 2017, @11:53PM (#510300) Journal

    I've heard that early CDs were sometimes made with equalisation that was intended for photonograph records. Phonographs "undo" that equalisation but CD players do not. Hence when those CDs are played, high frequencies are over-emphasised. This link explains the equalisation for phonographs, but doesn't say anything about CDs:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization [wikipedia.org]

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  • (Score: 1) by toddestan on Wednesday May 17 2017, @02:40AM

    by toddestan (4982) on Wednesday May 17 2017, @02:40AM (#510896)

    Another problem is that a lot of the early CD players didn't have 16-bit DACs either. So while the data may have been 16-bit, the CD player was down-sampling it which certainly wasn't helping things.