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

[indybrett]

Thought I might try this for myself.

Without going into specifics, APS -Y yielded a smaller file size than r3mix on my particular music sample.

So there ya go all you r3mix lovers. Now you've got your preset.

I'm tempted to use this myself, but I think I'll wait and see what Dibrom is cooking up before I go and encode a few thousand songs. I'd hate to have to do it all over again in a month

As a side note. I encoded "Fatboy" as well. APS -Y came out the same size as APS. R3mix came out smaller. I expected this.

So, it looks like a good compromise. Smaller file size by losing some high frequencies that are possibly inaudible anyway, and still maintaining the quality in the audible range.