I'm rather knew to mp3 encoding, but I'm quite a fan of music and audio in general. I have made a few test in EAC and have found some settings that pleased me, but I'm always curious as to there being a way to further improve them. Could anyone tell me the b est settings for mp3 extracting, being quality the most important factor?

1) Enable Secure ripping
2) Enable 'Drive caches audio data' as a safeguard
3) Disable 'Drive reports C2 errors'
4) For mp3 encoding use LAME 3.90.3 --alt-preset standard.
(for LAME 3.90.3 look at RareWares - http://rarewares.hydrogenaudio.org)
This should be much more than enough for untrained ear. Normally around 200 kbps

If you really want to lose much space for very little quality gain, you might want to use
--alt-preset insane - always 320 kbps.

Don't forget to include switches for tagging - 'lame --help' in console will list them along other settings which you shouldn't use,
because they will be detrimental to the quality of MP3.

Newer LAME might be worse in quality terms (when using alt-presets) - it isn't so thoroughly tested.

The nr. 1 guide to setting up EAC

Please take a look at the FAQ, recommended LAME settings and recommended LAME compiles.

I recommend finding and setting your drive's offset in EAC as well, if you are interested in "perfect" rips.

And for better quality, consider Musepack (MPC) instead of MP3.

pretty much what they said. but dont follow the first reply's list of things to do. Your drive might not have certain features so detect it to be safe. And secure mode is a setting in which your cd-rom will scan the cd track several times to make sure it has a flawless .wav replica (that is if your cd isn't too scratched i've had a bunch of those). And as far as the compile version to use, definitely 3.90.3! It includes an integrated -Z path so your background music will be enhanced. For the commandline copy this "--alt-preset standard" without the quote signs. This is a variable bitrate commandline in which it will jump quality up and down to save space and meet optimal standards for transparency. dont use -insane, it should be called -retarded because you waste tons of megs and it sounds exactly the same as aps. Good Luck!

The first reply was correct in the sense that those settings will garantee 100% accuracy with any drive. If you have a drive that supports C2 error correction properly, by all means turn that on as well for a speed increase.

If you want to use --alt-preset standard with EAC, you need to set the encoder type to "user defined" and then put "--alt-preset standard %s %d" in the command-line box.

I have no idea what "-Z path makes your background music enhanced" means. Giberish? Anyhow, 3.90.3 is the way to go.

Thanks a lot for the replys, guys. But will this settings guarantee perfect rips? Even though you said this somewhere, you also said it is enoguh for the untrained ear, which I believe is not my case (I'm new to encoding, not music)

Secure ripping is THE way to go for DAE.

As far as encoding goes... Alt Preset Standard is great for audio enthusiasts and long-time music listeners. It takes a hardcore audiophile with golden ears to be outright dissatisfied with Alt Preset Standard.

That's not exactly how I would put it.
99.9% of the time, even an audiophile will be perfectly satisfied with alt-preset standard. It is only during the 0.5 % of time, when APS fails, that an audiophile will have problems with it.
So an average listener will be satisfied 100 % of the time
An audiophile will be satisfied 99.5 % of the times.

To see by yourself, grab the FLAC decoder, and try to encode some Killer samples in MP3. You won't experience anything worse. Or if it is the case, post a small exerpt so that we add it to the known killer samples

Links to flac and samples in the FAQ

'Untrained ear' means untrained in (or just bad for) detecting certain subtle MP3 artifacts.
If you wish to train, go to PC ABX training room.
I recommend to use Foobar2000 player and its ABX capability
(available by right-clicking while having two files selected).
This forces you to use ReplayGain, a technology of equalising loudness of the tracks.
Proper volume matching of test samples is very important for an ABX test.

Of course, detecting artifacts in APS requires really golden ears and much focus.

This is semi-related. How come people say that most of the time --alt-preset standard sounds same as extreme. and they also say that there are a few exceptions. well in what case would it sound bad? please be specific guys!

http://www.ping.be/satcp/tutorials.htm

As for MP3 encoding, I prefer to use LAME 3.90.3 (with the RazorLame front-end) and the --alt-preset standard -Y custom setting. The -Y switch slightly decreases the quality in comparison to the usual --APS but substantially decreases the file size on most of the files that I encode. I personally can't hear the difference...

Lame --alt-preset standard always aims to be completely transparent (same goes for mppenc --standard --xlevel) for music under all normal listening conditions (all loudnesses, speakers or headphones etc).

This means that if it messes up and an artifact gets through on a killer sample, it doesn't know it's producing an artifact and wouldn't know where to use any extra bits to fix it. The artifact reveals a subtle fault in the decoder's psychoacoustic model (or in the case of MP3, it might be a limitation of the MP3 format that can't be worked around).

Let me stress again that Lame --alt-preset standard has very, very, very few artifacts.

Dibrom says he also made --alt-preset extreme because he recognised that many users persisted in modifying the command line of --alt-preset standard with various unsafe switches (like disabling lowpass filter and switching from joint to normal stereo or using the buggy -q0 "quality" setting) that actually caused quality problems. They nearly always made it worse and used more bits. Many of the users psychologically wanted to use a few extra bits as a "margin of safety" to feel sure they'd got the best quality, but actually broke things in the process and made quality worse. So extreme includes a slightly higher lowpass filter setting and a sets the masking threshold slightly lower, so more bits are used to quantize more accurately and average bitrates come out in the mid-to-high 200's of kbps. People have the psychological feeling of safety but haven't used bad switches that actually make their sound worse. However, it's usually the placebo effect at work, along with the Pavlovian association that more bits means higher quality, and the perceived difference disappears under blind testing of the actual sound quality.

Try -alt-preset extreme on the killer samples previously described and try to ABX it against the original. If there's a problem with standard, it's the psychoacoustic model at fault or a limitation of MP3 format. Sometimes extreme will make the artifact very slightly quieter than standard, but it's nearly always still audible. It doesn't fix it because it just throws the extra bits at the whole spectrum, not specifically at the artifact (because it doesn't think it has left an artifact), so only a few of the extra bits happen to reduce the audible problem.

Given the vast amount of extra bits wasted on encoding inaudible stuff, it barely seems worthwhile to use extreme for such a subtle reduction of such rare artifacts.

--alt-preset insane is the best that MP3 can do and throws as many bits at the audio as possible, so it will sometimes fix artifacts of the psychoacoustic model by brute force. If you actually notice artifacts in a particular track with APS, perhaps you could re-encode just that track in API. It's far more likely to succeed than extreme, but it's still only rarely going to be an improvement over APS.

Finally, if you have an artifact that Insane can't fix but need to play it on a portable, you'll find that many portables support .MP2 or MPEG-I layer 2 (which isn't older and more outdated than MP3, it's just less complex to encode/decode). It has better time resolution (same as Musepack) so it can fix some pre-echo problems. However, few of the psychoacoustic models for MP2 are well tuned and there's no VBR mode included in the standard. You might need to rename the files to .mp3 if they aren't recognised by the player. mp2enc and toolame are available to encode (see Rarewares section) and so too are some other encoders. MP2 is useful for high quality encoding at 192, 224, 256, 320, 384 kbps (only CBR is fully supported).

However, most of us won't notice artifacts with --alt-preset standard. I'm personally far more annoyed by MP3's lack of gapless playback (also true of AAC/MP4 and MP2) and its limited ReplayGain support, and that's half the reason I use Musepack (standard, --xlevel) as my main format. (Better transparency, faster encoding and lower bitrates are also bonuses of Musepack). I still have a number of APS albums I haven't re-encoded to Musepack, where gapless playback isn't important and they sound great.

My opinion : "--alt-preset cbr 192"

Compatibility, encoding speed, overall quality, final size...

This thread is for you:

samples where aps or ape has a problem


Download and listen and see for yourself. Note that a slight change to --alt-preset standard was introduced because of this thread, and you're probably already using it.

It's the samples which aren't fixed by this change (-Z in lame 3.90.2, now defaulted in lame 3.90.3) which are most interesting.

Cheers,
David.

Only use CBR if you really need it. "--alt-preset 192" might be better for you (its ABR).

you mean your "uneducated, random decision of a command line you are going to recommend"?

Give me ONE good reason why you would choose that over --alt-preset standard or even --alt-preset 192. ONE. And don't say compatibility without naming a player you use which only does CBR.

Some players can play VBR, some others won't!! Windows Media Player do not display the bitrate correctly and I have found some artefacts on my DVD player that I don't have with a fully compatible VBR player..
I admit that VBR is the best, but I PREFER ENCODING WITH VBR, that's may Opinion!! I respect yours!!

ERRATUM : I PREFER ENCODING WITH CBR lol!!
I think this the end of the week!!!