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[dobon]

Mp3 VBR-Normal/Low-HQ  seems to work well with good sound quality and bitrates appr. 80 +/- 10 kbs.

Any other suggestions?

[rocketsauce]

I've encoded speech at bitrates as low as 32kbps and they sound fine to me.

Try encoding a few clips at different lower bitrates and see where the sound quality becomes unacceptable to you.

Rob

[dobon]

Thankyou. 32 kbs may work for low quality material such as broadcasts. As with music, I want the sound of the compressed file to be virtually undistinguishable from the original cd-wav file.

Low bitrate mp3 compression sounds metallic and hollow in my ears, even at 64 kbs, not to mention the 8 (!) to 48 kbs downloads offered by audiobook publishers.

I am looking for more sophisticated ways of encoding speech at lower bitrates without introducing artifacts, i.e. custom settings in Lame.

[rocketsauce]

Well, if 64kbps doesn't sound good to you, you probably won't be able to use MP3 to go much lower than the 70-90kbps that you're already using.

You might try searching the forums over at Hydrogen Audio, there have been a couple of recent threads on this topic.

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/

Also, there is a codec called Speex that was designed specifcally as a speech encoder. Of course, the files most likely won't be playable in MJ/MC.

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jfe1205/others.html

Rob