I just did everything with my phone when it comes to compressing audio, uploading it to google drive for embedding and sharing purposes. The song that I have chosen for this activity is entitled ‘Mama’ produced and sang by Jonas Blue featuring William Singe. By default, the song has its lossless attribute of 128 kbps with a 2.80 MB file size. Below are the compressed audio files with their respective converted bit rates.

ANALYSIS

Before answering the questions for this assignment, let us define bit rate first and its correlation to the quality of audio. Bit Rate refers to the audio quality of the stream. It is measured in Kilobitspersec (kbps or k). Bit rate is no of bits (data) encoded per second or the no. of bits transmitted or received per second. Higher the bit rate with more sampling rate requires high bandwidth and produces good audio quality. Low bit rates refer to smaller file size and less bandwidth with a drop in audio quality. For good quality music usually 64–128kbps (96kbps+ recommended) bit rate is preferred MicroPyramid. (2017, March 30).

What changes every time you reduce the bit rate?

- Besides the file size, the thing that changes every time there is a reduction of bit rate is the quality of the audio. Lowering bit rate may cause the audio’s amplitude variation to suffer, meaning to say that the loudness or softness of the different parts of it become uneasy to be distinguished. And most importantly, the artifacts or the unwanted noise in the recording may be noticeable as compared to the original recording. Compressing an audio file may be helpful when we consider saving file size space however the down side of it is that the quality suffers as well.

At which quality does the audio becomes unacceptable?

- At 32 kbps, the audio becomes unacceptable as it sounds fuzzy and a little bit distorted. The actual song (singer’s voice) at this rate becomes unclear and that the instrumental sounds like it was recorded from enclosed space that isn’t good for recording. There's also a lot of flare to fuzzy noise all throughout the recording.

Which bit rate is the quality to file size most efficient?

- I would say that the standard or the default bit rate which is 128 kbps is the most efficient because the audio quality is already great while the file size isn’t too big. But any bit rate higher than 128 kbps would definitely produce a good quality audio which is perfect for embedding an AVP or those that are suited for television or movie caliber.