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[HTPC4ME]

Hi all, I've had smartphones for years, and have used media center to convert all my songs to my storage cards via mediacenter convert, I've always converted them to wma. Today i tried mp3. and that format works on the phone, then i tried it again, but i changed the bitrate from 192 to 64..Well needless to say i hopped in my car and my 800MB's of songs sounds TERRIBLE!!!! cuts in and out sounds like the sound raises and lowers. the reason i'm here is I've already made my playlist! So can someone please tell me how to reconvert these to best Quality YET SMALLEST size via media center convert..

Any suggestions would be appreciated!

Chris

[NickM]

Depends if you are 60 years old with an encapsulated hearing range of 200Hz to 12,500Hz, or you're an audio phreak with bat sensing capability and your ears hurt with clipping in the 25,000Hz range.

Underlying concept is size is inversely proportional to quality, AUDIO quality, that is.  I have a selection of iPud's from the Shuffle onwards.  On the basis that I use the Shuffle for running, I can bear an lower audio quality when I can hardly hear the music above my puffing and panting.  However, when I plug a Nano into the car and I can tell the difference between max'd VBR and 180b/s.

Happily, MC can deal with all of this.  The once your music is in a non-lossy format, you can convert on the fly to each specific audio device.

n

[HTPC4ME]

well i am kinda a audio freak, but i dont need it prestine quality, due to in my car and other place where i will be pluggin the phone in the systems are mediocur. So you suggestion? steps for smallest files in medi canter? Please?

[jgreen]

x--
I think he's saying you have to listen to it.  Barring that, I'll tell you what I think.

For me, 128 kbps is the downside limit for mp3s.  I'm told AAC can go lower, maybe even 64.  WMA is supposedly better at 128 than mp3.  Alex B will chime in with newer mp3 codecs that perform well at ~128  Vocals transfer well at lower bitrates, symphonic music and highly fuzzed (Jimi or Garbage) need all the resolution you can give it.  James Taylor is reference quality at 128, while Jimi Hendrix peaks out even the original 7-inch tapes.   Oh well.

My current Ipod rez is 192 cbr.  I'm probably going to go back to ~256 vbr, when I get around to it.  Mostly, however, I want to poke a hole in the notion that you want all your music at once on the ipod.  I transfer according to rating, and I never miss the 1- and 2-star tracks. 

Good luck.  Like Nick says, one of the beauties of MC is that you can dynamically fiddle with your Ipod stash.

[NickM]

Probably the best thing for you to do is to choose a few songs from each genre that you listen to and encode them at different quality.  Play them back and see what level of quality is acceptable to you.

This is probably a bit over the top, but you may also bear in mind that as well as the audio quality that you consciously perceive, the brain is a clever thing… If you are familiar with the music, then the brain makes up some of the missing audio information, matching it to that which you have listened to before.  The effect of this is that you may feel mentally tired after listening to low quality music for a long time.

If this concept worries you, then just raise the quality a little more than you found acceptable in the first step above.

n

[Alex B]

Hi all, I've had smartphones for years, and have used media center to convert all my songs to my storage cards via mediacenter convert, I've always converted them to wma. Today i tried mp3. and that format works on the phone, then i tried it again, but i changed the bitrate from 192 to 64..Well needless to say i hopped in my car and my 800MB's of songs sounds TERRIBLE!!!! cuts in and out sounds like the sound raises and lowers. the reason i'm here is I've already made my playlist! So can someone please tell me how to reconvert these to best Quality YET SMALLEST size via media center convert.

Could you please explain what is the original format? Are you saying that you are transcoding from one lossy format to another? E.g. from 192 kbps > to 64 kbps. That will always result a bit lower quality than a 64 kbps file that is ripped directly from the original audio CD or converted from a lossless file format.

In general, I would say that the newest Lame v. 3.97b2 MP3 encoder with this custom VBR encoding setting:
-V5 -vbr--new
is as good as original for most of us in casual listening. The average bitrate with modern music is about 135 kbps. (3.97b2 should be available for MC 11.1 with the "Check For Updates" function.)

If the about 135 kbps files are too big I would try the next lower quality setting:
-V6 --vbr-new.
It should produce files that average at about 120 kbps. If that is still too much the
-V7 --vbr-new
setting could be tried. The average bitrate should then be about 105 kbps. I would not go lower than this with MP3 format.

These VBR modes produce the best quality files. The downside is that the bitrate is not predictable. A constant bitrate mode (CBR) uses always the selected bitrate and the quality varies according to the source's complexity.