Thursday, 02 May 2019
Should mono material get encoded at the same bitrate as stereo material?
No. Mono originals only require half the bitrate of a stereo recording to get the same quality. If you encode your Stereo MP3s at 192kbps, then the comparable Mono file would only need 96kbps. For material with little high frequency content and waves with a 22050 sample rate, 64k is recommended. Some spoken word material with no special background effects can be recorded at a low bitrate without suffering loss of quality. Experiment with Joint Stereo, Mono, and VBR to get a good encode with a small resulting file size. A useful rule of thumb: do not waste server space or force long download times by recording at too high a bitrate if the source material does not need it. On the other hand, do not allow quality to suffer by worrying only about file size, either.
