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[hbridge]

Hi, I love media jukebox, and mp3, but am having a really weird problem.  For a long time I have used CBR, but have become interested in creating "transparent" mp3's of my CDs (I listen to classical, jazz, and opera).  Therefore, I have begun to use Lame VBR(newest version as of 5.2.02, 3.92 maybe?) with the setting --r3mix to encode my mp3's.  

The Mp3's encode great, and the sound is really pretty good as far as I can tell.  Every once in awhile, however, both on Media Jukebox 8 and on my Nomad II, I'll get a glitch, or pop -- some sort of loud artifact.  The weird thing is, the glitches don't exist in the .wav files and the source can't be the ENcoder because when I scroll back to the same time, there's no glitch!  This suggests to me that it is a problem with the DEcoder, but how can this be?  I've never heard of such a thing before, nonetheless, it happens, usually, more than once a track (more often on MJ than on my Nomad).

If anyone can provide any insight I'd be very very grateful.  Thank You.

[ZRocker]

Are you using Digital Secure Copy Mode for your CD-rom setting (using Settings > Options > Device Settings in MJ)?  If not, give that a try (when you rip next time).

[Victor]

Try another player to decode/play it to see if it's unique to MJ or not.
Also try another encoder from other than MJ to see if it's unique to MJ.

Victor

[Poison Dan]

This is pretty strange. Are you sure you never had this problem with CBR MP3s ? Can you re-create soms CBR MP3s and listen again if you can hear any pops ?

Because the pops seem to be random (and you mentioned you don't hear them anymore when you scroll back to the same time), I'm thinking it might be your sound card (or your sound card driver).

Actually, every now and then I also hear pops when playing music, but I'm 99.9% sure the problem is caused by my crappy SBLive. Actually, I'm about to buy a new soundcard because of this.

If it really is your soundcard, then I can't explain why you are also experiencing the problem on your Nomad II. I don't know how good the VBR compatibility of that player is.

If I may offer you some more advice: if you really want "transparent" MP3 quality, then I suggest you use --alt-preset standard instead of --r3mix. It has proven to be a lot more transparent on difficult to encode samples. The encoding will be slower, though. And the files will probably also be slightly bigger. If you want to save some more diskspace, you could also add -Y (i.e. "--alt-preset standard -Y").

Check out this thread for more information about the recommended parameters:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=26

[hbridge]

First of all, thanks for all the responses.

I found that the pops that were evident on my Nomad II were in the track, so that wasn't the problem.

It seems the speed of one of my hard drives was the problem, because when I play anything off my normal "music" drive, I get the weird pops, but when I play an album off my newer hard drive, it works fine.

Phew.

Now if i can just get gapless playback working right, i'll be all set.

Thanks again,

Henry

[JimH]

You might want to take a look at the thread on Sound Blaster problems.  Just in case you have a Creative sound card.