users at xlr8yourmac.com did tests on this subject and here's what they found; link
Jun-18-2007 11:37
Darkarbiter
Psysnob
Registered: Mar 2007
Location: Melbourne
quote:
Originally posted by Mr.Mystery
Not necessarily.
Ok well anyway 320kbps meens 320 killabits (or bytes whatever) per second. Therefore a 10 minute mp3 song and a 10 minute mp4 song at 320kbps will be pretty much the same size apart from the extra text info (title, arist etc which should only be like <10kb) so when your comparing different codecs for audio you'd want to look at the quality per byte. Also diffent codes have different qualities they can be at (e.g. wma is like 48kbps to losses wheras mp3 is like 128-320kbps I.E. much smaller).
Anyway point is when comparing codecs in general you look at quality for size or just quality. The kbps is the size.
.mp4 or .m4a is a container format, meaning its like a candy wrapper. I have not tried downloading an mp4 file from beatport, but i suspect they sell AAC encoded music under .mp4 extention. Mp4 does not have to be video and audio. It can be combination of anything. AAC is a more intelligent way of compressing audio than MP3. I have found out that music encoded at 192kbps AAC sounds as good or better than 320kbps MP3.
.mp4 or .m4a is a container format, meaning its like a candy wrapper. I have not tried downloading an mp4 file from beatport, but i suspect they sell AAC encoded music under .mp4 extention. Mp4 does not have to be video and audio. It can be combination of anything. AAC is a more intelligent way of compressing audio than MP3. I have found out that music encoded at 192kbps AAC sounds as good or better than 320kbps MP3.
Beatport encodes mp4s at 170-205 kbps VBR using AAC compression which, according to tests carried out by www.soundexpert.info, works out at about the same quality as a 192kbps MP3 (depending on the encoder they use), so I'd stick with 320k MP3s personally.
AAC does tend to offer better quality at lower bitrates when working with bitrates below this, and in fact an AAC+ encoded at 320kbps is supposed to sound better than a 320k MP3... but it seems it doesn't make a lot of difference at that sort of range.