Have you ever heard of anyone mastering to 128k bitrate WMA’s?
Here’s the story. I have a client who had a deal with Tate Media Group to produce her album. Because Tate is in Texas and she lives here in Omaha, we recorded most of her vocals here and sent them to Tate for final production. The package deal included mastering replication and packaging of so many hundred CD copies, plus some distribution and promotional perks.
Unfortunately, Tate went out of business before finishing the project. They apparently got the mastering done, and sent her the mastered tracks on a CDR, but she’s on her own for replication, etc.
So she brought this disc in to me, and the “mastered” files are in WMA format. They’ve definitely been mastered as they are loud and at (mostly) consistent levels. They sound pretty good, and the files are huge, as big as they’d be if they were waves. But WMA is a lossy format, and I don’t think 128K is the highest quality it can be encoded in. (but maybe I’m wrong about this? I never use this format…)
128k is the lowest form. Yeah, it’s absolute shit. Compare the cymbals to your lossless file, it’s absolute garbage. It’s what you’d expect out of a bad youtube upload. I would find someone else to master them again.
This guy would be the ultimate… http://www.barrydiamentaudio.com/
I’ll master it again for free, and practice.
Sounds to me like the disc they’d offer you before you give final payment (to check the work). At least, I hope that’s the reason. If they were offering that as a completed project, then I’d say they were never worth dealing with in the first place.
For WMA, 128, it’s the lowest that is still standard. I think it goes down to 20. Blind listening tests say it’s a little better than lame at 128, but inferior to AAC and Ogg Vorbis.
Thanks. Tate shut down in January. The artist was moving at the time, and then her husband died, and I didn’t hear from her for several months. Now that she’s caught me up on what happened it’s probably too late. But I asked her to look again and see if they sent her anything else. She’s kind of absentminded (plus losing your spouse after a lifetime together kind of trashes your focus for awhile) - I’m hoping they sent her a better copy and she just misplaced it.
According to Wikipedia, there was/is a lossless version of WMA - it surprised me to learn there were actually a number of different versions of the WMA codec…might be worth investigating? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Media_Audio
Something isn’t adding up correctly here. If they are actually 128mbps (I’m assuming that’s what you mean by 128K) Then they are not going to be the same size. They’ll be about 1/10th the size. So if they are that big, then they are not 128mbps.
At first I thought he was referring to MP3’s and 128 mbps, but everyone kept saying 128 K and WMA’s, so I assumed WMA’s file size is measured differently…I’m confused here. All I know is WAV’s and MP3…and only a little bit about AIFF.
WMA is Windows Media ? If so, just how good can that quality be? I wouldn’t expect great quality from that…but maybe I’m wrong.
Hey Boz, I think he meant 128kbps, the bitrate, not the file size. That’s definitely what I meant.
According to Microsoft management, it’s supposed to sound as good as 128 MP3 at 64kpbs. Blind listening tests proved that to be bogus, but it is supposed to be every so slightly better than MP3, but inferior to AAC and Ogg Vorbis. I use FLAC for the machine and AAC 512 kbps for portable listening because I’m insane.
oops, that’s what I meant too. I was just being retarded when I wrote mbps instead of kbps. Either way, if the file size is the size as big as they would be if they were wav files, then they definitely aren’t 128kbps
Kinda screwey for sure. I’d say it was a ripping problem, but it’s a CD-R. Did you use a program like Windows Media Player or did you just copy them directly off the CD-R? Maybe it’s the lossless kind and whatever program is telling you otherwise is wrong?
Yes, I just copied the files from the CDR. I saw the 128k bitrate in the file properties in Windows, but it didn’t give me much more information. Is there another program I should use to examine the specs?
When I saw in the properties that the file size was 48MB, I now realize that I had all 15 songs selected. 48MB is the cumulative size of all 15 songs together. The individual songs range from 2.5MB to 4.8MB, roughly what I’d expect from 128kbps MP3s.
So, that mystery is solved…You have yourself 15 songs of low quality MP3’s. 128 Kbps is about as low as anyone would want to go in terms of quality. Actually that’s really a drag that the lady only got those MP3’s. You’d think they could have given her 320 kbps at the very least…Even that is barely acceptable.
