What is the equivalent of the normal and low VBR settings? I used Normal and it looked labout like a -VBR 2 Fast encode ?
In MC12.0.164 the settings are:
Normal -V 4
High -V 2
Extreme -V 0
The "Fast" switch enables --vbr-new, which is the current LAME developer's recommendation.
The grayed out custom dialog box works as a display that shows the actually used command line. When the Custom option is selected you can use any valid LAME commandline switches. Here's more info about the recommended LAME settings:
http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=LAMEIn the build 164 the VBR command lines are still written in the old "preset" style, but this is going to change in the next build that uses the "-V" style commands and has the --vbr-new switch enabled by default. This style change will not alter the encoding quality. The "preset" style and the "-V" style use internally exactly the same encoding options. In addition the next build is going to have two new lower bitrate VBR options.
Doesn't MC 12 come with the APE codec in it? I went to convert APE to MP3. My LCS flashed at me, then went a little crazy. Then it came back to tell me that it could not do it.
MC has always had Monkey's Audio support. It is rather strange that the MP3 conversion does not work for you. I do it almost daily without any problems.
Is it possible that those APE files are corrupted somehow? As a test, could you try to convert a wave file first to APE and then to MP3?
EDIT
Before the next build is available you can use for example
-V 5 --vbr-new as a "VBR low" setting in the custom box. Its target bitrate is about 130 kbps (naturally the actual resulting bitrate depends a lot of the encoded material). The audio quality is about the best that MP3 has ever offered at this bitrate - quite comparable with newer codecs like AAC or Ogg Vorbis. Here are the results of an interesting 128 kbps multi-format listening test:
http://www.listening-tests.info/mf-128-1/results.htm. LAME was practically on par with the newer codecs (within the test's error margin).