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

I had read the theory, but my test result did not hold to it. In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, theory and practice are different. 

I just repeated my test on a different track with the same result. Not dramatic but still has lowpass 16 doing better than -Y. Perhaps -V3 is affecting things in a way you weren't expecting?
Peter

Hmm, I think -V3 may very well have an effect that the bloating doesn't happen so often. The reason for the bloating is relatively high resolution deman for SFB21 compared to other SFBs, which leads to resolution increase in all SFBs, but when you lower the overall resolution demand by increasing -V it may very well help make it happen more rarely.

Still I think if you test even more tracks, you'll find a track that bloats clearly with --lowpass 16 but doesn't at -Y.
If you don't care about over 16kHz then for best results you should use both. If you wan't to retain even somekind of over 16kHz freq response, you should use only -Y which prevents file size bloating.