best mp3 preset and settings for 128 kbps CBR Options

[m3gab0y]

Hey guys, maybe it's discussed before (I found only the threat from 2003), and sorry if i'm posting duplicate.

I have a radiostation that obviously has output frequency responce of 30 hz up to 16 khz, with brickwall filters, and some other fancy equipment....
I want to steam this station at 128 kbps and achieve the best possible quality of a CBR 128 KBPS mp3 encoder. Did I mention that the input material is 99.9% lossless audio?

I currently use edcast with Lame 3.93.1 using preset=12 and quality=0 and I'm getting decent results. But I hear lots of dirrerence between the original output and the stream. Am I doing something wrong? And is there better way to squeze more out of the mp3 codec?

This post has been edited by m3gab0y: Jun 5 2011, 22:53

[2Bdecided]

You can use ABR with a hard bandwidth cap - but worst case that's as bandwidth hungry as CBR at the bandwidth cap. If that worst case is acceptable in bandwidth terms, you might as well use CBR at that bandwidth cap!

The advantage of ABR or VBR in this case is that it can save you a little bandwidth/money, but not increase quality.

You could manage peak and average bitrates over timescales which equate to typical buffers, giving you a potentially useful quality increase (compared with CBR) within the same overall bandwidth constraints. However, unless I'm mistaken, lame doesn't give you this kind of control, does it?

You could say that you don't care, and that overall VBR will still work well enough overall - but then you will get users whose feed drops out when the bitrate goes up. That's far worse than an occasional encoding artefact.

Cheers,
David.