After watching Lewis Blacks’ “gay banditos” skit on YouTube, I decided to buy his albums. Hahaha, don’t you just hate it that I can now use the word buy without batting an eyelash? Anyways, the variable pricing scheme AllofMP3 has on its encodes made me realize something when I was comparing them with one another.

You see, when it comes to simple audio (as against music) I tend to pick the lower bit-rate to save on money. Because lets face it. A live performance by someone who simply talks doesn’t need much fidelity to be appreciated. Since I love comic acts so much, the process of analyzing a good price-quality ratio seemed very relevant to my predicament.

Did you know

…that the CBR¹ prices of downloads are the same as their VBR² counterparts? It’s true! I thought “Hey 128kbps should be enough for a stereo file of non-musical content.” I mean honestly, I don’t need full resolution for speech, the human voice in itself covers a very narrow frequency range in the audio spectrum, what are you going to do with all that additional fidelity from a higher bitrate? That’s not to say of course that a low bitrate is enough to properly represent the sound of human speech.

My point is that if you listen to music, you listen to the actual audio content… when listening to speech, you’re listening to the content of the audio. There’s a difference.

A decently recorded band with decent sounding instruments, when recorded. It is important to capture as much as possible (if not completely) resolution you can get out of the audio they produce. Because the different instruments require it. Cymbals (or any high frequency instrument) will not sound proper if you can’t represent the frequency range they “live on” properly. Which is exactly what lowering the bitrates does to the material.

However, someone talking. For as long as the recording doesn’t sound too terrible, and people can understand what the hell you’re saying, no one would really mind. You can go as low as 64kbps on a mono frequency (128 stereo) and still get a somewhat fair representation of human speech.

Hence, for audiobooks, stand up comic albums, I choose to go the best value bitrate. Which at first I thought was 128kbps CBR – which is the lowest AllofMP3 can offer. But for the heck of it, I tried selecting 128kbps VBR, the price didn’t change! It was a dead ringer. Here I was justifying the possible “floor” at which I would sacrifice quality to save some money, when a VBR version, which can give more resolution (since it bumps up the bitrate when there are parts that require more resolution) at the same price!

So the tip is, when getting from AllofMP3, don’t bother with CBR, unless you’re really strapped for hard drive space (because they can be smaller) – always go VBR – because you get higher quality at the same price. And logically, when you’re already considering the highest bitrate (pseudo CD quality, as they would say), VBR might just end up being smaller³ with the same quality. It all depends on how good the encoding algorithm is of course, but I believe they use the LAME codec, which is known for it’s VBR encoding.