If I convert a track to a lower bit rate like 48 kbps, does that mean that the song can get cut off?

I'm getting a Sony Bean Mp3 player and for more songs to be put on it, it has to be converted to atrac3plus in this Sonic Stage program. It has all these diferent bit rates. And they said that the larger the bit rate, the more information is stored for the track. I was wondering if I don't use a high bit rate is it going to cut the song off before it finishes?|||No, the song won't get cut off. Bit rates are essentially sampling mechanisms (kilobits per second, to be exact). You DO lose information, but, theoretically, you lose information that you won't miss. This is the same concept as a jpeg photograph, as opposed to a .gif photograph. The .jpeg photograph is more compressed; if you were to blow it up to an enormous size, you would see that there are blank spaces within in - if you were to blow up a .gif of the same photo to an enormous size, you would see that there wouldn't be all those blank spaces. But the photo doesn't actually get smaller or cropped or anything.





With a low bit rate, you will actually lose information; essentially little bits - literally - of sound will be cut out and replaced with silence. But the bits are so small that the average human ear won't detect this until the level of compression is quite high. In fact, all mp3s are compressed, but if you can detect the difference between an mp3 (compressed) and a .wav file (uncompressed), I'd be impressed. You have to have a very good ear to tell the difference.





On the other hand, cutting a part out of your song (like the ending) will make the file smaller - shorter songs are smaller files if the sampling rate is the same.|||No it doesn't. It just means that sound quality will suffer. The lower the bit rate, the lower the sound quality.