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

[pacohaas]

Originally posted by JohnV
Again... -Y is not a lowpass. 
Just to put it simple (I've explained this so many times already during few days), using -Y can directly affect to the bit allocation of the whole frequency range of MP3. If it affects, the effect will be lower bitrate. -Y also can retain some high frequency content, so it's not a lowpass.

I understood that, I wasn't saying it was just a lowpass, I guess I was trying to point out that it might not be the optimal solution to lowering the bitrate because it only lowers bitrates based mainly on frequency data and not highly optimized and tweaked as --alt-preset standard is. So I agree with you, and here's some data to add:

[b]--alt-preset standard --lowpass 16
1. 173
2. 178
3. 175
4. 164
5. 168
6. 172
7. 171
Average: 171.8

======================================
As you can see, this data is very close to the --alt-preset standard -Y data, which backs up my original correlation between a lowpass and -Y (and again, yes I know that's not what -Y is)

Holy Smokes! 
You ripped 7 albums 5 times just to experiment? My Hats off to you.

thanks, when I do a test, I want to do it thoroughly. I picked some well mastered/produced CD's(because I knew they would be higher bitrate that my other CD's) and some good compilations(to test a range of recordings) to get a thorough test.