Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Archis]

I am new to all of this and was wondering what people thought the best MP3 enocoder for sound quality is?  I know there is a trade off between quality, speed and size, but I am mainly concerned with quality.  Any suggestions for encoders?

[Harry_The_Hipster]

Lame for mp3. MJ/MC offers either a plug-in, or the ability to utilize an external encoder with specific settings entereed by the user.

Search through the forum for extensive discussions of proper settings for various bitrates, or go tohttp://www.hydrogenaudio.org.

HTH

Listening to: 'Perception' from 'Perception' by 'Connie Crothers' on Media Center 9.0

[Archis]

Thanks HTH, I will take a lood at the Lame encoder.

[MachineHead]

MJ uses LAME. It's the one available on the plugins page.

[nila]

Arch - LAME is the only option.

Your real choice comes more with what encoder settings to use.

CBR is the old method with people using 128 for the music as it gave near CD quality. These days however, with increased hard drive capacity, 192 has become pretty much the norm as you cant tell the difference between it and CD's unless you have VERY good equipment as WELL AS VERY GOOD ears.

CBR is nice because you can see exactly what bitrate has been used for the songs so gives as easy rough indication of quality.

VBR however is better all round these days if used with a proper encoder like LAME. You set the maximum value to a very high setting and then when it needs to, lame can use a HUGE bitrate for parts of the music that require it and lower bitrate for parts that are relatively simple.

VBR is the best option these days although a large number of people still use CBR just for the reasureance of seeing a nice high bitrate. Unfortunately I am one of the latter


If you want to get a really good amount of control over what settings you use, then download a front end for LAME called: Razorlame. It gives you access to I believe it is ALL of LAME's options via an easy to use GUI and also has a good number of pre-set configurations that can be loaded up depending on what you want to do.

For a lot more info on the subject visit:
http://r3mix.net/

Hope this helped

[MachineHead]

Unfortunately I am one of the latter

This surprises me Nila. Why? I have been using alt preset fast extreme (vbr) for quite a while and to be honest, can't tell it from 320 cbr. Don't make sense to waste that much HD space for something that isn't all that noticable.  :-/

[rocketsauce]

If you want to get a really good amount of control over what settings you use, then download a front end for LAME called: Razorlame.

IIRC, Razorlame doesn't add tags unless you use the proper command line.

It gives you access to I believe it is ALL of LAME's options

The only LAME options you really need are either --alt-preset standard or --alt-preset extreme.  They are tuned for quality far beyond anything anyone could come up with by tweaking the various LAME options on their own.  The presets can be used easily in MJ/MC by configuring it to use the External Encoder and pointing it to the lame.exe, choose the Advanced button and in the Parameters box put --alt-preset standard %IN %OUT.

Download lame.exe from here.  3.92 or 3.90.2 are the recommended compiles:

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?act=ST&f=15&t=478&s=14d0113282a8471ba669c0f68e289a4c

If you really need to use a specific bitrate, it is better to use something like --alt-preset 192 or --alt-preset cbr 192.

192 has become pretty much the norm as you cant tell the difference between it and CD's unless you have VERY good equipment as WELL AS VERY GOOD ears.

Good ears are always important.  There are a couple of recent threads over at Hydrogen Audio, though, where Dibrom (the developer and tuner of the --alt-presets) said that the equipment is the least important part of the chain.  In fact, apparently he did most of the quality tuning of the --alt-presets using an old laptop with a cheap soundcard and cheap headphones.  Yet in listening tests the presets have been proven again and again to produce the best sounding MP3s over any other encoding method.

Rob

Listening to: 'Long Ass Zite Groove Den...It's Alright' from 'Sweetened-No Lemon' by 'Sound Patrol' on Media Center

[nila]

I know it's bad Machine but I'm just a slow adapter of technology.

The main thing about it that I like is I can easily see the quality.

I still have a lot of music I ripped ages ago that is lower bitrate and I like to be able to differentiate between it and my higher quality rips.

What would be nice is if MJ could store either the settings used to encode or some kind of indication of the quality etc except just bitrate as this is currently the only method I have of telling.


It would also be really nice if it could store different encoder profiles.
Right now we can use the external encoder option but that means if we want to change settings we cant save the old ones and load them up again.
It'd be nice to be able to save settings as well as encoder paths to Names that then appeared in the list of encoder options just like: ogg, mp3, ape, etc. so that we could then have:  ogg, mp3, mp3 - alt preset fast, mp3 - 192 cbr, mp3 - vbr, ape, etc. with our own settings blended in seemlessly.

[rocketsauce]

The main thing about it that I like is I can easily see the quality.

bitrate = quality doesn't really hold true when it comes to VBR encoding because the encoder will use whatever bitrate is necessary for any given point in a song.  During complex parts of a track, the encoder will go all the way up to 320 if needed and during less complex parts it will go as low as 128 (I think, for --alt-preset standard).  By choosing a cbr bitrate like 192, you are actually limiting quality because you are wasting bits on parts of the song that don't need to be encoded at that high of a rate and limiting the encoder to 192 on parts where vbr would use 256 or 320 (or something in between).  Using --alt-preset standard will generally give you files that are only slightly larger than cbr192 files.

What would be nice is if MJ could store either the settings used to encode or some kind of indication of the quality

I created a new field called "Encoder Settings" and put in the name of the encoder, it's version and the settings I used whenever I add new files to the library.  For example: mppenc 1.14 (--quality 6 --xlevel).

It would also be really nice if it could store different encoder profiles.

Right now we can use the external encoder option but that means if we want to change settings we cant save the old ones and load them up again.

That would be a great feature. What I've done is put all of the external encoders (lame.exe, oggenc.exe, mppenc.exe) in one directory, so it's easy to change the encoder path.  I've also created a shortcut to a text file on the Windows Quicklaunch bar and I save all the various encoder command lines there so I can quickly copy/paste them into the Parameters box of MCs External Encoder. It's not as good as having MC save the settings, but it keeps me from having to type them over and over and possibly making a mistake.

Rob

Listening to: 'Mother Earth' from 'Dubtribe Sound System' by 'Dubtribe Sound System' on Media Center

[MachineHead]

I know it's bad Machine but I'm just a slow adapter of technology.

After seeing some of your posts here I find that hard to believe.  

The main thing about it that I like is I can easily see the quality.

Hmmm, I think your ears might tell you a different story. Try a test between the two settings and try and pick out which is which. You may surprise yourself. Maybe have a pal play the song so you don't know what file (constant or vbr) is being played at the time.

Also, you probably know this, you could use the auto smartlists (modified to target certain bitrates) to pick out which files are hi and low bitrates.

The profile of encoder settings stored somewhere would be kind of handy. But, right now I'm using EAC because of a mishandling (on my part) of MP3Gain. And, though I think it is a good idea, I rarely use anything other then the above mentioned setting for mp3s.  :-/

Maybe if hardware manufacturers would come up with support for more formats (MPC comes to mind), I would then have more need for the profile settings being stored for easy access.

Anyway, have a nice day. It is not nice here -19^o F!!

[nila]

Glad you think I adapt to technology fast.

I do with a lot of things, I LOVE gadgets and fidgetting and testing software, sometimes trying to create my own so that it's more suited to my needs etc.

With the mp3's it's just a case of wanting to be able to tell at a glance what's what.

I've been playing for a while now and trying to decide if I should move to vbr mp3's (i do use these for my portable and they do an INCREDIBLE job at VERY low settings) or if I should change to ogg.

Main thing against ogg is it's lack of support by players, burning software etc.


I wish I worked for MJ, I always have tooo many idea's I'd LOVE to throw in it and if I was one of their proggers I could do all kinds of changes.

I think I'd probably go for a R.A.D. development approach and blitz the forum with things for people to test.


I do love technology - I'm still trying to decide what to do in my car.

I'm thinking about a pc in the boot with a screen up front linked up with a tablet as the input device.
I can then have MJ, GPS, and something like Power DVD all installed so that in my car I have built in GPS, Music and films as well as games.

I'd probably put some voice activation software in there too so I could control it by simply touching any part of the tablet to make it stop the music and listen, then tell it what song to play

The only thing stopping my car and house from becoming techno village on wheels is a lack of cash at the moment - finding a job after graduating is VERY hard, especially if you dont have the best degree grade which I dont as the course (computer science with management) was just too darn boring and slow and pathetic to actually make me think or get me at all interested. I think my exams when I was 16 were more interesting and mentally stimulating



wahoo - I somehow seem to do ridiculasly long posts without even trying or realising. This is one of them