Why does this 8kbps VBRmp3 sound so strange?

I found this upload, it has to be some kind of joke, the mp3 quality is so low that only 0.1% of the sounds are in common with the original
http://chomikuj.pl/Simon3rd/Muzyka/Indi ... ss*408kbps
Obviously an unacceptable way to listen to the album but I thought it might be a cool way to maybe generate some nice synth textures if I could just process my own tracks Does anyone know how to do this? I tried converting songs from the same album to 8kbs mp3 at the lowest sample rate available, 11025, but it wasn't nearly as strange as the files in the link. If you are at all curious, "03 touched' is a whopping 65kb!

for actual conversion i'd use either foobar or commandline lame

another very viable option is using the spectral trace plugin from soundmagic spectral (free - au and os x only). it would do the same thing as this mp3 by picking only the loudest frequencies and removing all the rest.
http://www.michaelnorris.info/software/ ... ctral.html

the free tracker plugin from mda might also get close http://mda.smartelectronix.com/effects.htm

if yer into this sort of thing - here is iron maiden encoded to mp3 666 times http://www.coryarcangel.com/things-i-made/maiden/

also check reafir, that has some weird sounds up its sleeve that kinda emulate this

Convert the file over and over again, you can get some crazy textures even out of white noise if you convert a bunch of times. aphex twin did it in the tracks formula and windowlicker. You can hear that interpolated mp3 aliasing through out both tracks.

interesting, I think that might be it actually, I don't underatand how but the sound is definitley changing every time I convert it.

Harmoncj wrote:interesting, I think that might be it actually, I don't underatand how but the sound is definitley changing every time I convert it.

It's because mp3 isn't like wav, if you convert a 24bit wav file to 16bit bit, and try to convert to 16bit again it will be the same. But mp3 will keep on interpolating between points of information, so it's more like dumping something to tape over and over so you keep degrading quality.

if you think of every sound as a bunch of sine waves added together, what mp3 is doing is each time it encodes it, it removes the least noticeable sine waves.

at first, you don't notice it as sine waves because there are thousands of them - they all add together to make the sound you hear.

as you reduce bitrate / re-encode, more of these are removed so you are only left with the loudest sine waves.
hence the warbly sine wave sounding thing.
this is also why a sine-tracker plugin or a spectal gate works to emulate mp3 compression.