Print

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

[Scarpad]

I Have a question on the LAME encoding Options within MC12.

There are three Presets under MP3 encoding, Small Portable, High Quality Portable +, and Normal. All three are VBR encoding, but I'm not familiar with the 1st two as normal presets of LAME. So I'm wondering about the Difference between the Small and HQ Portable settings. I've tried both Normal and the HQ setting , HQ seems to peak out about 160kbps and Normal can peak out to about 320kbps, is that the main difference? And what's the Peak on the small Portable setting? I'm buying a Creative Zen and I'll have 32gb between the built in Flash and the Add on Card. So I'm trying to maximise space but achieve a decent sound...

Any help appreciated..

Dave

[Alex B]

Those are just friendly names for the less technically oriented users.

The actually used LAME command lines are

Small Portable:	-V 6 --vbr-new
High Quality Portable:	-V 5 --vbr-new
Normal:	-V 4 --vbr-new
High:	-V 2 --vbr-new
Extreme:	-V 0 --vbr-new

-- which are explained here: http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=LAME

You can also see the used setting as a grayed-out text line in the Custom box. It acts as a settings display when the Custom option is not active.

In my opinion the HQ Portable setting is good enough for casual listening on a portable. Usually the resulting average bitrate varies between 125 and 140 kbps (this depends a lot on the complexity of the encoded material) and the audio quality is fine. It is much better than the old standard, CBR 128 kbps.

The Small Portable setting produces a bit smaller files. The resulting average bitrate is often about 105-120 kbps. It is possibly the lowest still enjoyable VBR quality setting.

[Scarpad]

Is there enough of a difference between the HQ Portable and the Normal Setting to justify the file size changes, there does'nt seem to be,...

[Alex B]

The quality and the size differences are not big between the HQ Portable and Normal settings. You could simply encode a few files using the HQ Portable setting and see if you can hear any audible quality problems.