How to know the bit depth of a mp3 file?

audio mp3 codec
user991800 picture user991800 · Dec 26, 2014 · Viewed 11.5k times · Source

A MP3 file header only contain the sample rate and bit rate, so the decoder can't figure out the bit depth from the header. Maybe it can only guess from the bit rate? But the bit rate is varying from frame to frame.

Here is another way to ask this question: If I encoder an 24 bit WAV to mp3, so how does the 24-bit info stored in this mp3?

Answer

ioctlLR picture ioctlLR · Dec 26, 2014

When the source WAV is compressed, the original bit depth information is "thrown away". This is by design in any compressed audio codec since the whole point is to use the least bits possible to store the "same" audio.

Internally, MP3 uses Huffman symbols to store the processed audio data. As such, there's no real "bit depth" to report.

Related questions

Playing .mp3 and .wav in Java?

How can I play an .mp3 and a .wav file in my Java application? I am using Swing. I tried looking on the internet, for something like this example: public void playSound() { try { AudioInputStream audioInputStream = AudioSystem.getAudioInputStream(new File("D:/…

Read More
Playing mp3 song on python

I want to play my song (mp3) from python, can you give me a simplest command to do that? This is not correct: import wave w = wave.open("e:/LOCAL/Betrayer/Metalik Klinik1-Anak Sekolah.mp3","r")

Read More
What is the best way to merge mp3 files?

I've got many, many mp3 files that I would like to merge into a single file. I've used the command line method copy /b 1.mp3+2.mp3 3.mp3 but it's a pain when there's a lot of them and their namings …

Read More