ogg auto-encoding lo-volume passages at lo bitrates?, ...tried this question with mp3s with no luck. Options

[selection7]

First, my audio to be encoded never has any true, dead silence.
But for example, I have a track that's nothing but a count in and and then only noise floor afterwards...and I want this 4min file to encode at no more than maybe 600kb since 97% of the file should be encoded at ~32kpbs while the part with actual audible sound gets encoded at more like ~200kbps. I know it's common for variable bitrate encoders to vary bitrates depending on frequency, but I want it to vary depending on volume too! Yes, encoders do reduce bitrate drastically when the file is flatlining dead silence, but I don't want to have to noisegate to achieve this and I don't have dead silence, just noise floor. I'm not the only one who'll be encoding with this purpose in mind and that's an extra step I'd like to avoid for multiple reasons.

I can't find an ogg encoder that will do this? Has anyone achieved this or have any useful info/suggestions?

EXTRA INFO:
What I'm doing is encoding separate tracks that make up one song, but I'm finding that my LAME encoder (and others I've tried) encode near silence (noise floor) at roughly the same bitrate as very loud audio even. I want it to encode at something like 32kpbs when the audio level is that low.

[selection7]

Thanks again for your thoughts. What you're saying is all good stuff. But while I was trying not to bore you with essay length posts (I like lots of detail myself, but learned long ago that often others will just do a tl;dr), lol, but I guess I do indeed need to explain myself since you (understandably) still seem concerned with why I'd want to do it that way.

But first, thanks 2Bdecided, for the info about old versions. That's a lead anyway. You don't happen to have one of those old verisions?

I decided to see if I could track down an answer to this issue to help someone else, but someone who I don't necessarily want noisegating things. Granted, noisegating only noise floor can't be screwed up if you set the settings correctly beforehand as a template. But I also don't like workarounds (noisegating) if I think a proper solution could exist, and I don't want the extra step (which maybe means another piece of software?) for others who might be lazy or careless. In this case, low volume material such as bleed and background sounds would likely get muted during a final mixdown of the individual instruments in the multitrack anyway, however, there is still useful information there (bleed for timings...comments by an engineer...obvious audio cues as to what other instruemnts were accompanying "live" while the one in question was being recorded...whatever) that I don't want completely lost, yet don't care if it sounds poor (after all, it won't be in the final mix). While googlebot is right to say that 32kpbs is useless for anything you'd want to hear for music listening, it doesn't matter if I don't want to noisegate. Plus, 32kbps being 95% artifact is a huge exaggeration (I just tried it to confirm). To be clear, when I said I'd be surprised if it didn't exist (and 2Bdecided says it does**did**), I meant lower bitrates for very quiet passages or frequencies but not 32kbps stupid low. For me I guess, what would work best is something that would do 0!kpbs at noise floor and up to maybe 96 for very low volume sounds, with everything above that threshold getting normal treatment. I just didn't want to be overly demanding when I posed the original question...getting pointed in the right direction was my first goal. So anyway a 32kbps bitrate would only make sense for my specific purposes or if a noisegating didn't get used (even if it should have been). Any bitrate spent on a very low volume section is bitrate not used on cymbal crashes, so it doesn' matter if we're uncomfortable with the idea, it's a tradeoff one way or the other whether we like it or not.

That out of the way, are there encoders that will employ noisegating? I'm not stubborn, if I can't find an older encoder that will encode lowest volumes at something small then I will look into how well the other options could work out.

This post has been edited by selection7: May 25 2011, 01:48