Hello, I have a few questions about sound quality. From Napster you can download Window Media Audio (WMA) format at 128 Kbps stereo. Is this CD quality? If you use Tunebite to legally transform the music to DRM free is it still the same quality? Also, if you take a WMA file at 128 Kbps and put it on a CD to play on a car head unit, will the quality be CD quality even though it has a 24 bit D/A converter? Basically I am looking for great quality music from a service, like Napster, to play in my car. Any other suggestions or comments would be greatly appreciated. Thank-you for you time.
If you are looking for decent quality music, my friend, 128kbps DRM protected .wma is pretty much as bad as it gets. By burning it on a cd and playing it on a better audio source, it will sound a little better, but that is only aplifying what little quality there is. Hmmm, the only legal site I can think of that does great quality (VBR) music is [bold]allofmp3.com[/bold] http://www.allofmp3.com/ when you say 'cd quality' do you mean to the quality of that on the origional CD? the answer to that is no. On nearly all legal sites, they come with DRM and are of 'standard quality' but they are not a patch on the actual cd/VBR music
Allofmp3.com seems kind of expensive. Are there another other services out there? About the quality, I am looking for something that cannot be distinguished from CD quality. Keep in mind the music will be played in a high end audio system.
Also, are there any services that you can rent audio CD's through the mail ex. Blockbuster or netflix?
VBR is the best quality you can get for an MP3 file. On P2P networks I know alot of the latest albums released are encoded this way. For me personally the lowest I can stand for MP3 bit rate is 128. Anything encoded properly at 192 or above sounds no different than if I bought the album from a shop.
About P2P is it illegal, as the RIAA is concerned, to download music files and not keep them in a shared folder?
No, p2p isn't tecnically illegal, hence the reason they haven't been shut down. If you download stuff off p2p but only keep 50 or so in your shared folder at any time, you'll be fine.
Following up from what Lethal said P2P is and isn't legal. It's what you download that determines if you breach copyright or not. Say if you download a file that is shareware or doesn't cost anything e.g. a PC game demo than that isn't breaching copyright because you would be able to download free from a legit website. But if you download music, movies, games etc. bascially anything which you would normally have to pay money for then that's what makes it illegal.
