Recording Quality

[mwsmith]

I subscribed to Pandora One to get the 192Kbps. If I select the recording output in Replay Music as 192k will I have no loss in quality or will it be compressed even more?

[Cheryl Wester]

Give it a try and see how it works for you. I had people report that they sometimes record at a bitrate higher than what it is recording at for the quality they want. It is going to record what it hears.

[maxrenn]

I'm a subscriber and i set output options to 256kb.
Try Replay Media Catcher; it works great with Pandora and there's no transcoding involved. You won't have to worry about bitrate settings anymore.
Bye.

[significant]

Hi,

first thing: whereever your music comes from, it's already compressed to some mp3/wma/ogg/whatever-format which will not be quite as perfect as standard CD sound. When you play this music on your computer, it's decoded back to full WAV/CD size before it gets to the speakers, but you can't get back what you've lost in quality. So, what you're hearing is just the 192kbps from Pandora One.

Now, when Replay Music is recording, it will capture your computer's audio lines (i.e. the 192kbps stuff decoded to something like PCM/WAV) and will start compressing the freshly decoded stuff again. This will inflict another loss in quality and therefore reduce audio quality further.

Anyway: selecting a high-quality codec in Replay Music (for example 256kbps or more) will decrease this re-encoding quality loss. Compressing with 128kbps might finally sound just like 96kbps since it was twice compressed and not with very lovely quality; compressing with 256kbps will never sound as good as a primary encoding from CD with 256kbps, but it will be significantly better than 128kbps or less. In fact, it's pretty hard to tell the difference between a 192kbps streaming file and a re-recording made with good quality >192kbps.

I use 192kbps; between 192 and more, I can't figure a difference any more (once made a comparison file for myself where several compression bitrates changed within a single song - above 192 it gets really difficult to tell if there's any change at all; but below 160kbps it is quite obvious).