The Effects of Lossy Audio Encoding on Onset Detection Tasks

In large audio collections, it is common to store audio content with perceptual encoding. However, encoding parameters may vary from collection to collection or even within a collection - using different bit rates, sample rates, codecs, etc. We evaluate the effect of various audio encodings on the onset detection task. We show that audio-based onset detection methods are surprisingly robust in the presence of MP3 encoded audio. Statistically significant changes in onset detection accuracy only occur at bit-rates lower than 32kbps.