Suggest ~160kbps VBR setting. Options

[guidryp]

Hi,

Looking at the suggested settings/presets I am dismayed at the lack of a VBR setting that operates at a lower bit-rate.

There is APS standard, which on my music easily averages over 200Kbps. In fact my latest Rush albums are averaging over 220Kbps.

I can see noisy metal taking over 220kbps, but a song like Rush-Nobody's Hero taking 230Kbps?

For me, it calls into question the validity of the VBR model if the answer to lower than 230KBps encoding is to use the ABR/CBR settings.

ABR doesn't seem much better than CBR after watching it encode 90+ % of its samples at the target rate.

Surely a VBR setting can be cooked up that can encode the above track at ~160kbps in VBR and still sound better than 160 ABR.

PS - I want to use this setting in my compact Flash based portable, in my car etc. My max space average is 160Kbps do to the size of the portable memory. But I want the best quality in that space.

Peter

[JohnV]

Originally posted by guidryp
For whatever reason, I remember --lowpass 16 using less bitrate than -Y. Adding -Y to --lowpass 16 used exactly the same amount of bits. My conclusion was that the lowpass superseded -Y.

Seems that you didn't understand the SFB21 problem with vbr I was trying to explain. If you use only --lowpass 16, the lower frequencies may still bloat the bitrate because of the SFB21 vbr problem (there still remains few MDCT coefficients over 16kHz which can bloat the bitrate when doing the bit allocation/noise shaping).

-Y affects to the bit allocation of all frequencies (SFBs) by disabling over 16kHz noise shaping.

Here's the more exact explanation of the SFB21 vbr problem: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/showth...10724#post10724