Thursday, 02 May 2019
Winamp tells me that .wav files are 176kbps. Why don’t we just encode at THAT bitrate and get .wav quality MP3s?
What Winamp is *really* telling you is that your .wav file is recorded at 178kiloBYTESps and not kilo-bits per second.
This has caused a fair amount of confusion in the past. When you digitally extract a stereo song from a CD, there are 176,400 BYTES for each second of music. That’s 176.4 kBYTES per second . Noting the fact that there are 8 BITS in each BYTE, you arrive at a BITrate of 1,411,200 bits a second, or approximately 1411kbps. Remember how a 128kbps mp3 should be ~1/12th the size of the original .wav? Well 1/11th of 1411kbps is ~128kbps.
