I think LAME is a synonym for quality. The "low quality" options in LAME have not been tweaked for ages if ever. Personally I would not use -q values that are worse than 5.
I suppose 7 could be acceptable with high bitrates, but 9 is bad.
From the LAME documentation:
=======================================================================
fast mode
=======================================================================
-f
Same as -q 7.
NOT RECOMMENDED. Use when encoding speed is critical and encoding
quality does not matter. Disable noise shaping. Psycho acoustics are
used only for bit allocation and pre-echo detection.
and
-q 9: disables almost all algorithms including psy-model. poor quality.
The fastest commandline I would use is -b 256 -q 5 --noreplaygain (or some other CBR bitrate, but not lower than 160 kbps with -q 5).
As you said, --noreplaygain is a bit faster because the replay gain calculation is disabled (this not used with MC or DAPs anyway). BTW, --cbr is not needed, plain -b xxx makes it CBR.
Instead of tweaking LAME settings I would use the Fraunhofer encoder included in WMP10. It is often 4x faster than LAME.
Here is how I have made it available as an external encoder in MC:
- The default WMP10 MP3 encoder can be installed as an ACM codec by this small registry edit:
http://www.looprecorder.de/tut_l3codec.php- ACMENC, a commandline frontend for ACM codecs is configured as an external encoder in MC.
http://nyaochi.sakura.ne.jp/xoops/modules/mysoftwares/rewrite/tc_3.htmlMore information about these:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=26956With the
-p fiis-pro -b 256 %IN %OUT commandline in the MC's External Encoder options it encodes 256 kbps MP3 files at about 47-48x speed on my 2.8 GHz P4. The audio quality is fine at this bitrate and tagging works too.
During encoding the command prompt looks like this:
ACMENC version 0.6 Copyright (c) 2004 by Nyaochi (Thu, 16 Sep 2004)
Input: D:\Test\bfft2004-04-06d1t10 (temp).wav (Microsoft WAV 44.1kHz 16bit 2ch)
Output: D:\Test\bfft2004-04-06d1t10.mp3 (MPEG1 Layer-III 44kHz 256Kbit/s 2ch)
Fraunhofer IIS MPEG Layer-3 Codec (professional) Version 3.3.44
Copyright (C) 1996-2004 Fraunhofer IIS
|%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% | 96% 6.19sec at 47.5x
You could provide the External Encoder option for handhelds. Or even better, you could make a new plug-in for this encoder. The plug-in would do the same things as ACMENC and apply the registry fix. I don't think the ACMENC code is very complex.