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

[mithrandir]

Originally posted by guidryp
The problem I have with ABR, is that it looks like a marketers attempt at VBR. It varies frames a bit, but it appears like it is not enough to be significant.

Philosophically VBR should deliver the best bang for the bit, so I get stuck on that. Even a low tweaked VBR will still use a number of 320kbps frames that I don't see from ABR 160. When watching them each encode. So it seems that VBR is spending more heavily on the difficult sections. I guess it would be annoying to me that ABR 160 would still use 160 kbps to record silence.

You appear to more concerned with what you see on the console output rather than what you hear. It is not acceptable, for instance, to say that one encode is better than another because it has twice as many 320kbps frames. If both files are the same size, then the one with more 320kbps frames is making compromises in other frames. Which is better? You really can't say unless you rate each file in a blind test.

You say ABR appears not to vary frames enough to be significant, but that is just an unproven hypothesis unless you have real listening test results that validate it. You would benefit from some blind listening tests so that you can remove any hint of subjectivity and pre-determined notions from your decision-making. I'd like to make two WAV files of Nobody's Hero: one decoded from a 160kbps ABR MP3 and another decoded from a 160kbps VBR MP3. You wouldn't know which is which and would have to say what you thought of each. THAT'S where you want to take this: forget about what you "feel" about ABR, the proof is in the pudding. If you think a 160kbps VBR file sounds better than a 160kbps ABR in such a test, then that's the encoder method for you in this case. But until you perform such a test, you shouldn't claim ABR is somehow flawed for various gut-feeling reasons while people here are telling you objective reasons why VBR can falter at lower bitrates and why ABR is the better choice.