Alcorn McBride Knowledge Base

The 8TraXX and MP3 Audio Machine are compatible with any MP3 file currently supported by the most popular (and some unpopular) software encoders available. The bit rate you should use primarily depends on three factors: How much media storage you have, how much material you have to store on the media, and what sound quality is required. The 8TraXX and MP3 Audio Machine each come with 16MB of storage, which is approximately 16 minutes at 128kbps encoding bitrate. They can be upgraded with any size compact flash or microdrive media. Current sizes range up to 300MB and 1Gig for the compact flash and IBM microdrive, respectively. Generally speaking, for near CD quality you can get about 1MB per minute of playback, or about 10-to-1 compression. It all depends on your application and the material you're playing back. If you have a large, high-quality sound system playing music in a theatre or studio type of environment, go for the higher bitrates and lower compression ratio. More storage per minute of audio is required and you might need to increase your media size On the other hand, if you have a situation where dialog is playing through small 5-inch speakers in a display case or kiosk, you may be able to get by with 64kbps encoding The best thing to do is try out the different encoding rates using your material. There are other settings available on most software encoders such as VBR (variable bitrate encoding) and 'High-Frequency Mode' but a quick look across Internet sites indicates that these don't do much to improve audio quality, although the may increase encoding efficiency in some cases. Neither the 8TraXX nor MP3 Audio Machine use the ID3 tag, so it doesn't matter what you include in that section of the encoder, although it may be useful for archiving your files.