wavpack lossy for archive and transcoding, 512kbps Options

[zorba]

hello,

my recent rips have been done with Max : WavPack lossy at 512kbps.

then, I transcode them into ogg vorbis Q3 for portable and/or AAC in itunes.

What I like is fast encoding and fast transcoding while having a good size/quality ratio for both archive and portable use.
Do I need to pay attention to noise, even with those overkilling 512kb bitrates ?

I don't want lossless because it's too big and I'm not keen on blind tests.

thank you.
Z

[shadowking]

512k was flawless even in the earlier days without psy modeling or joint stereo - using the high mode .
In reality, You would be hard pressed to abx anything @ 400k these days with a strong setting like -hx4. I'd go even further and say that you can take things down to 350 k without sacrificing much quality as we now have basic psymodeling as in dynamic noise shaping + auto joint stereo. With the 4.50 encoder I find 270 k gives more or less a similar quality to 180 k traditional encoder. In addition, Guruboolez found that transcoding wavpack 350..400k was very close to perfection.

This post has been edited by shadowking: Mar 11 2009, 06:37

[zorba]

thank you

I don't use dynamic noise shaping neither joint stereo nor -x,-h. Everything is set to auto with cdex (pc at job) and Max (mac at home).

[bryant]

I don't use dynamic noise shaping neither joint stereo nor -x,-h. Everything is set to auto with cdex (pc at job) and Max (mac at home).

Unless you specifically override it with the -s or -j options, you get dynamic noise shaping and joint stereo by default in lossy/hybrid mode in recent WavPack releases (at the CD sampling rate, anyway).

At a bitrate of 512 kbps, I am confident that audible degradation (even for transcoding) will never be an issue. I use 384 kbps for the same purpose, and your bitrate will give over 8 dB less noise than that. Being able to specify something like -x4 would be better in some obscure cases, but the advantage of fast encoding goes away then.

[zorba]

I don't use dynamic noise shaping neither joint stereo nor -x,-h. Everything is set to auto with cdex (pc at job) and Max (mac at home).

Unless you specifically override it with the -s or -j options, you get dynamic noise shaping and joint stereo by default in lossy/hybrid mode in recent WavPack releases (at the CD sampling rate, anyway).

At a bitrate of 512 kbps, I am confident that audible degradation (even for transcoding) will never be an issue. I use 384 kbps for the same purpose, and your bitrate will give over 8 dB less noise than that. Being able to specify something like -x4 would be better in some obscure cases, but the advantage of fast encoding goes away then.

thanks Bryant,

well, I'm trying to transcode some wavpack lossless into wavpack lossy 512.

I wanted to use MAX by sbooth.org to get those lossy files but I experience some trouble with it. How can I be sure that MAX goes right and deals with the lossless hybrid version (WV+WVC) when his fellowpart PLAY (Mac player) seems to fail with lossless : when I look at the bitrate of some albums in TRACK INFO with PLAY : it shows only 400kb. As if MAX was dealing with only WV without carrying for the correction files.

Those WVC files are in the same folder that WV files, then I don't know if MAX can do the job when PLAY seems not to be able to play correction files.



PS: Lossless Wavpack with correction files are dating from my Windows times with EAC.

This post has been edited by zorba: Mar 13 2009, 21:47