by Scintilla » Sun Mar 18, 2007 9:25 pm
That makes no sense. I assume you're getting your bitrate information from Windows Explorer, which never reports average bit rates for VBR MP3s correctly.
If you want to know the real bitrate, I would suggest doing something like the following:
- Open the MP3 in Windows Media Player 6.4
- File --> Properties
- Advanced tab
- Select "MPEG Layer-3 Decoder" and hit Properties
- Statistics tab
- The "Bitrate (detected)" should be what you're looking for, though in the case of a VBR MP3 like the ones you have, this value should be changing every second or so. Observing it for a while should give you a good idea of what the average bitrate is.
Usually, you would expect the larger file to have better overall quality, but there are exceptions.