Nero AAC - Lower fractional quality values not really lower, e.g., q 0.2185955271124839644 > q 0.22 Options

[Unown]

I have found that some actually lower quality values produce higher bitrates in Nero Digital Audio Reference MPEG-4 & 3GPP Audio Encoder (Version: 1.1.34.2, Build date: Aug 6 2007)

I was just trying to get the lowest possible quality while not introducing any crosstalk between the channels in a test sample, when I found that the bitrates where not decreasing.

The -help switch says that the value of -q "is a floating-point number in 0...1 range".
0.2185955271124839644 is a floating-point number, it's lower than 0.22, and it's producing bigger files in all cases I tested.
So... there's something bad there

May I be doing something wrong?
Or is this a problem in the encoder?

Thanks for the attention, I hope it can be fixed.
And sorry for my poor English!

EDIT: BTW, "target quality" mode is the highest quality/smallest file mode available, isn't it? Or may two-pass target bitrate mode be better in some cases?

This post has been edited by Unown: Oct 30 2007, 21:48

[menno]

For different expected bitrate ranges the encoder uses different parameters that produce different results. On the switch between parameter sets there might be "glitches" in the bitrate. I already explained before that in the last version we brought the gaps between the sets together much closer, apparently in some cases even too close... The old encoder made jumps of ~10kbps between sets, that was also not good (although for some reason less people complained )