Bit of a lamer question (no pun intended) but impressed by the work that Dibrom and r3mix are doing to bring the less technically minded (sheepish grin) into the realms of high quality MP3 encoding, I have been tinkering around using Dibrom's dm presets and was wondering if I wanted to encode a file designed to be streamed at 64kbs using the astounding :] server push technology from Kasterblaster, what would be Dibrom's or other informed parties chosen set of command line switches at that bitrate?

Any help appreciated

Regards

Bladeraptor

I think that for 64kbps mp3s or anything below 112kbps or so, it might be better to look at a different encoder. Perhaps Fhg Fastenc would be best in this situation. One of the issues is that LAME does not support intensity stereo which can be quite useful at these bitrates. Besides that, I believe fastenc is widely regarded as the best mp3 encoder for bitrates around and below 112kbps.

If you must use LAME in this situation however, abr would probably provide the best quality, but then that wouldn't work all so well with streaming.

What could be the best solution overall in regards to quality, might be to just use mp3pro however. At these bitrates you will probably get better quality with mp3pro than you would with most other codecs even. It should be compatible with current mp3 streaming software also, and I believe the winamp plugin supports streaming. If I were to setup an mp3 streaming server right now and was concerned mostly with quality, that is what I would do.

May not have been the answer you were looking for, but it should give you some good ideas

I'll have to talk to Kelly myers and see if his Kasterblaster supports MP3 pro yet - otherwise an FHG implementation eh?

Thanks again

Bladeraptor

I don't actually think there would be a problem as long as the software is fully compatible with normal mp3 streams, since mp3pro doesn't violate that, it just includes a little of extra information there that is normally ignored.



Yes, if for some odd reason mp3pro would not work here, then I definitely think fhg would be the way to go. I suggest you check out http://ff123.net and look at some of the discussion about fastenc as there are a few versions with bugs in them that were released. You want to make sure you get ahold of a good one.