Let me preface this by saying I do support my favorite artists by buying their tracks on Beatport, but I can only buy my very favorite songs. I live in India on an Indian salary so I can't afford to spend hundreds of dollars on music. The rest I download legally (but with low bitrates, and I would never use them in public) or I get from friends who are DJ's (high bitrates). I never ask these friends where they get their music. It's sort of like how you don't ask questions about how the clothes you buy or the food you eat was produced, I guess.
Anyway, the last person to give me music told me (without me asking) that he gets it from a website that (legally) provides links to download the tracks from soundcloud or youtube. He says a lot of the tracks can be downloaded at 320 kbps, and that most of the ones he gave me had come from that site (he says that for a lot of songs, it displays five different bitrates with their corresponding file sizes, and you can pick which one to download, ranging from 64 to 320). All of the songs he gave me were at 320 kbps (I right-clicked and clicked on properties and then the details tab) and were large files.
I call BS. I thought everything loaded on to soundcloud and youtube was at 128 kbps. How could these be 320 kbps? So is it possible for an audio file to display a high bitrate when it's it's actually low-quality? How can I tell the difference? The 2.1s I use at home are pretty shitty so I don't know if I'd be able to accurately tell. I definitely can tell the difference on really nice speakers but I don't have access to some normally.
What also makes me doubt is that I once went to this website that could transpose audio files into a different key. I used it to transpose a file that was 128 kbps a half-step down (from F# minor to F minor) and the final file had a bitrate of 192 kbps.
Edit: it does. It's called upscaling.
https://www.reddit.com/r/hiphopheads...al_bitrate_of/
https://www.maketecheasier.com/check...e-audio-files/
http://www.walterdevos.be/how-to-che...ty-of-mp3-file
Sorry for posting this. I did google first but I guess my search terms weren't very good. I tried googling again and found these articles.
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