Stereo Tool

After looking at some waveforms I *think* it might be possible to improve the audio of low quality MP3's. Not really sure yet - but it's definitely worth looking into.

super !

Are you planning to do something similar to ffaudio's Crystalizer?

This! I was wondering if you're still planning to do this...I understand that maybe it isn't a priority, but still it would be useful albeit in a more "home user" purpose.

Did this plan pushed through?


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After hearing a lot of really bad MP3s lately I'm really doubting if this is really possible. There are more problems in MP3s than I realized when I typed this.

My idea was that, just like in clipped audio, enough data would be left to be able to regenerate the rest.

If you play an MP3 and look at the spectrum, there are big holes, and they look VERY different from 'natural' holes in the spectrum (they are COMPLETELY silent). When you KNOW that there's a hole you can try to fill it up with something - probably almost anything is better than having a hole.

What I overlooked was that in MP3s one of the other biggest problems is that the start monent of sounds is often not clear anymore (at low bitrates you loose punch, sounds don't start and end suddenly but come up and go down gradually). And there's no way of knowing if that's intentional or a result of MP3 encoding (you could probably look at the slope etc., but it would get very complex).

Having said this, if you listen to a low bitrate MP3 you can imagine what it SHOULD sound like, so something should be possible...

MP3 like alot of other lossy codecs cause immense damage to the audio stream. So I truely believe it's not possible. One can imagine a bad MP3 like being a bad JPEG image at the lowest quality settings. The best you can do is mask the problem.

@Chibisteven: Yes, but give this image to an artist and ask him or her to try to draw the original. The text won't be readable but the top part might actually look pretty good. At least a whole lot better and more natural-looking than in this image.

you mean kinda like the undo filter in breakaway box?

No very different... Undo is something like Natural Dynamics in ST (except that Natural Dynamics doesn't work too well yet which is why I disabled it by default).