Compressing video

[Wished]

The mp3 file itself sounds okay but for my latest AMV, I compressed it and it seems to other people there are tons of static-y sounds. I don't really hear it on my speakers so it wasn't really noticeable to me but if it's that noticeable to others, I must be doing something wrong.

Currently my settings are:

Audio format: PCM Uncompressed
Sample Rate (hz) 48,000
bit depth: 16
channels: stereo

To be honest I know NOTHING about audio and its technical things, so what should it be formatted into to prevent static?

[Scintilla]

Most popular music these days, if I'm not mistaken, is released at 44100 Hz, not 48000 Hz. If you're running Windows, then open the file's Properties in Windows Explorer, go to the Summary tab, hit Advanced if you're seeing the Simple view, and scroll down to "Audio sample rate" (unfortunately, Windows XP rounds this to the nearest kHz; but if you see "44 kHz", it's almost certain to really be 44100 Hz).

Also, getting a lossless copy of the music, rather than starting from an MP3, would help. I suggest going back to the CD and re-ripping it to a lossless format (uncompressed .WAV is the easiest and most convenient for most people).

[irriadin]

^^ What Scintilla said. Audio conversion from lossy (ie, MP3, OGG, WMA etc) to lossy will see a serious degrading of quality, so make sure you take his advice and start with a lossless source (from a cd, obtain a .FLAC, etc). If you get a FLAC or WAV, you can convert it to any other audio type without losing any audio fidelity (insofar as transcoding is concerned.)

[mirkosp]

Adding to the above, if you bought your music on iTunes it's lossy, but there are various other online sites which do sell FLACs (I like bandcamp, but it's not the only one, there are a lot, although not all groups release FLACs in online shops...).