What are some of your guys albums that have a high ABR in general? This could be in any format really. I have noticed that Green Day - Warning is very high although it does not seem like it would be. Both high ABRs in -aps mp3 and gt3b1 q5 ogg vorbis. Anyways...

Overly loud and compressed albums are worst, as are those with lots of high-frequency sounds.

Ministry's Animositisomina is the worst offender I have. 272kbps average for one song with --alt-preset standard on LAME 3.90.3.

This song dropped to 241kbps after encoding with an album wavegain --scale of 89dB applied to it.


Scott Weiland's album "12 Bar Blues" has a lot of high frequency stuff on it. It also has many songs in the mid-200s, but once again drops significantly with a (somewhat more modest) --scale applied.

I assume you ment VBR (Variable Bit Rate) rather than ABR (Average Bit Rate) as VBR is were the codec decides what bits to allocate wereas with ABR you define a bitrate to work to (by averaging)... thus if you really ment ABR, then all albums would be the same size (roughly) due to the target setting...

Hope that made sense, it is late ere!

yeah well encoded in VBR (i said -aps) but the ABR is high

Synthetic music as well as metal have high average bitrate, mostly due to high frequencies.

Dire Straits - Brother in Arms (not remastered) is quite hard to compress too.
Few tracks have been known to produce artifacts in some encoders.

Most of the Paul Van Dyk CDs that I have average around 230-240kbps with --aps.

Recently I encoded 'The Essential Ozzy Osbourne' compilation 2 CD set. Quite a few tracks ended ups in the 230-250 kbps range. Good music needs a lot of bits

"Since I Left You" by Avalanches produces a very high average bitrate, especially the title track - I started a thread about it in the MP3 (Tech) forum a while ago:

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....t=0&#entry89971

Anything by "In Flames" is going to be through the roof. Some of their tracks are close to 300kbps IIRC with APS.

Converter - Blast Furnace averages in somewhere between 285-310 w/ aps for me. This cd is blarringly loud though, if you heard it you would probably understand why...


Jeff

How are you basing these? By that I mean what player or other app are you using to check these numbers?

Using MC I can see the bitrates change as the track progresses. And it also gives a static display when browsing through the library. But this may be inaccurate. Hmm, maybe should ask Matt about that...

Anyway, Red Harvest - Cold Dark Matter has a few tracks that peg the VBR meter at nothing less than 192, and most of the time 256 to 320.

Yeah, Red Harvest's got a really dense and claustrophobic guitar tone that I think might contribute to this. I don't see these tracks as being particularly high in Vorbis Q6 (haven't converted this album to FLAC yet).

Dave Matthews - Before These Crowded Streets is really hard to encode for some reason (way harder then any other DMB album). Also Pennywise - Full Circle; Dimmu Borgir - Puritanical Euphoric Misanthropia; and Slayer - Diabolus in Musica.

It depends on the encoder a bit too. Musepack doesn't seem to go up nearly as much with fast heavy music as VBR LAME does, from my experience.

Someone I used to know's band, asked me and I agreed to try and master/EQ/replaygain their stuff so it sounded better, since they didn't have anything to do so themselves.

287, average bitrate, LAME 3.90.3 --aps. I'm guessing it was the drummer since the cymbals's echoes were detailed and full. VERY wierd, I wish I still had the song, as I'd want to look more into why the bitrate's so high... it can't be JUST cymbals.

Linkin Park, can go above 250k easily with --aps. They louden their stuff way too much.

The dirty dozen (tracks):

Note that the shortest track 'Useful Idiot' has the highest bitrate.

Sister Don't Cry Collective Soul Hints Allegations And Things Left Unsaid 4 4:02 (283)
Stuck With Me Green Day Insomniac 3 2:15 (279)
C'mon Everybody Humble Pie Smokin' 4 5:13 (275)
Sweet Peace And Time Humble Pie Smokin' 9 5:48 (284)
World Machine Level 42 World Machine 2 5:15 (278)
Sliver Nirvana From The Muddy Banks Of The Wishkah 8 1:56 (285)
Polly Nirvana From The Muddy Banks Of The Wishkah 14 2:30 (284)
Roll With It Oasis (What's The Story) Morning Glory? 2 4:00 (282)
Morning Glory Oasis (What's The Story) Morning Glory? 10 5:03 (278)
Riders On The Storm The Doors L. A. Woman 10 7:10 (288)
Useful Idiot Tool Ænima 4 0:38 (313)
I, Zombie White Zombie Astro-Creep:2000 7 3:31 (276)

My winner is Strapping Young Lad's "City", with most tracks over 250kbps.

I must seriously disagree with Hanky - good music does not need a lot of bits. Most of my favourite Jamaican music comes in around 130kbps, and it rocks.

Although I don't have any my guess for the highest bit rate would be something like the Japanese noise artist Merzbow, who's music is notoriously difficult to compress: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....=0&#entry101012

.dd.