Again a newbie question. I've been encoding all the time on 'original' Radium hacked Fraunhofer in high quality mode on 192 kbit and I've been quite contempt with the results.

Now I've read a lot about VBR (and this concept makes a lot of sense to me) and about how much better LAME is supposed to be. Is this really true for songs of that bitrate or does LAME only score on lower/higher bitrates?

In any case I'd like to try this out with LAME 3.91 on VBR (ABR is beta IIRC) but which is the right setting to use to achieve a similar quality? I'd like to have the mp3 to be mostly around 192 kbit to achieve a similar size and quality.

I got a lot of my CDs to convert to mp3 and I'd like to do it only once so I gotta decide between FhG and LAME. I won't choose any of the other formats yet simply because I won't be able to use them for a long time on consumer players like my DVD and portable players.

Thanks for any info you can provide.

You'll find that LAME VBR will yield much better results at a comparable (or lower!) average bitrate if you use "--alt-preset standard". The Radium Codec is not the best around IMHO anyway.

alt-preset standard should target around 192kbps average, so it would be just right for you

I don't know what you mean about ABR being beta :confused: It works just as well as VBR and CBR.

CU

Dominic

Ok I found myself in the same position a couple months ago.

For the bitrates you want

I'd recomment LAME 3.91

--alt-preset standard

But on the other hand if you want to be a bit on the safe side, call it peace of mind.

--alt-preset extreme

This preset offers a higher quality with bitrates between 200-250
I burn all my mp3's on cd-r's so I don't really care about the higher bitrates as cd-r's don't really are expensive these days.
I gues you will probably also be burning them since you use a dvd, so I'd say think about it!

Btw

I also asume that you want to archive the cd's in that case I would go straight for extreme since you only want to do this once.

I hope this helps you out a bit, I know how hard it is when you have like me (temporarely) 300cd's laying around to encode and you have to choose how you will encode them.

Sorry, OT, but I couldn't help laughing at this Freudian (?) slip.

ff123

Well, actually not intended; being a non-native speaker my english ocasionally sucks

I'm still a bit undecided which way to go. As said before 192 kbit fhg always worked fine for me and obviously for the 'scene' as well. Though I've managed to hear some artifacts on 128 kbit I never did on 192 so far; that and the IMO quite resonable tradeoff between file size and quality on this setting lets me stick to 192 kbit rather than using 320 kbit for my archiving purposes (for really important stuff I'd use losless compression).

Yet, I'd like to use LAME's VBR setting to 'spread' the given amount of bits more effectively on the song so I guess I'm gonna give the -alt-preset standard a try after having checked the usage possibilities for these presets.

in case you got more suggestions please let me know. Thanks.

If you didn't hear any artifacting using the fhg encoder at 192 I'm pretty sure you won't hear any using --alt-preset standard, I'd say go for it.

--alt-preset standard will give you markedly better quality than Radium 192, although you may not have the ability to hear the difference. But some people you play your music for might hear the difference. No real reason to move up in bitrate to extreme if you're already content with Radium's 192 kbps... but if you like that filesize you'll do best with --alt-preset standard. I assume that --alt-preset cbr 192 would be a fair bit better as well, but you may as well go vbr and maximize your bit usage.

VBR is so reasonable when music signal is unstable.