MP3s have become so ubiquitous that we often forget it’s a compression format. When music gets trimmed to one-tenth of its original size, lots of information deemed “unimportant” gets tossed out. Here ...

OK, recently I did a Divx rip of Spy Game, and decided to try something a bit different with the sound. Normally I compress the soundtrack to MP3 while muxing it with Virtual Dub or NanDub.

Some music/audio is more sensitive to MP3 compression algorithms than others, and in any case it is possible to encode (or re-encode) a poor source at a high bit rate and still end up with crap.

If you’re listening to music right now, you can probably hear the vocalist’s slight pitch-shifts, or hiss of a drummer’s hi-hats, or the padded thump of a synth bed. But do you ever think about what ...

Whether or not you can actually hear the difference between a high-quality MP3 file and a lossless version of the same song is the subject of much audiophile debate. But there’s no question that no ...