most difficult genre of music to mp3 encode?
Reply #21 – 2008-09-15 12:01:38
I haven't ABX'ed this or anything, but I have noticed that when using a VBR with target bitrate of 210 or so, rock bands like The Donnas, Nashville Pussy, Backstreet Girls, Rose Tattoo and that kind of music always lands on a much higher bitrate. It may well be transparent at that bitrate for all I know, but it seems like the codec "struggles" more to get it right, since target is 210 and the result usually is in the range of 230-250. The common denominator for those bands are very distorted guitars (using no other effects than what guitar and amp can produce) and very tight rhythm. I've noticed that the latest Metallica album just released, Death Magnetic, when encoding using LAME 3.98 -h -V0, each track's average VBR rate is around 300 kbps. At that level, I might as well just go with 320 kbps CBR, as the savings when using -V0 would only be a few megabytes at the most. I would venture a guess to say that the extreme DRC, distortion, and clipping is causing a lot of that. However, even the older Metallica albums have average VBR rates in the 280-290 kbps range when targeting 256 kbps with -V0 This just a good example that mp3 kinda sucks for Heavy Metal and other music that has alot high-freq noise, due to sfb21 bloating at V2 - V0. And using V0 for alot Metal tracks is a complete joke and you are better off using 320 CBR sometimes, with the bitrates that V0 gives out. Even at V2, i got a few tracks that ended up at 260kbps, because of sfb21 bloat. And also you would expect a V2 encoded track to be transparent at 237kbps, but guess what.foo_abx 1.3.3 report foobar2000 v0.9.5.4 2008/07/17 11:22:55 File A: C:\Temp\2 Run To The Hills.wav File B: C:\Music\Albums\Iron Maiden - The Number Of The Beast\06. Run To The Hills.mp3 11:22:55 : Test started. 11:23:45 : 01/01 50.0% 11:23:50 : 02/02 25.0% 11:23:59 : 03/03 12.5% 11:24:49 : 03/04 31.3% 11:25:15 : 04/05 18.8% 11:25:20 : 05/06 10.9% 11:25:26 : 06/07 6.3% 11:25:36 : 07/08 3.5% 11:25:45 : 08/09 2.0% 11:25:57 : 09/10 1.1% 11:26:29 : 10/11 0.6% 11:26:48 : 11/12 0.3% 11:27:07 : 12/13 0.2% 11:27:19 : 13/14 0.1% 11:27:37 : Test finished. ---------- Total: 13/14 (0.1%) Has drum smearing at 0:48. I found it transperant at -V0, but at a whooping 290kbps though. I also found it transparent on LAME 3.98 at V2. I have done a couple of LAME V0 transcodes from FLAC of Metallica's new album and Iron Maiden's Power Slave. Death Magnetic was 25mb bigger then my V2 encode and Power Slave was 20mb bigger.