Hi to all,
please help me with Lame settings.

I have some music collections which exactly fit on a cd. They are made in ogg. I want (for my friend who only can do hw decompresing) to do the same in mp3. I am going to take pains over and use original (uncompressed) sources.

What is my problem. Encoding by Lame 3.90.3 alt-preset standard I get around 10-15% bigger files than that in Ogg (q6). But I want it to fit on a cd again. Is there recommended some another setting to tweak the length of files (knowing about some lose of quality) ?

Thanks

You can add -Y to --alt-preset standard. It's in the FAQ. As are ABR modes which (if all else fails) will let you target the average bitrate to match the size of the CD.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
David.

EDIT: Link to lame settings FAQ

Some of it depends upon what type of music you are encoding. For instance alot of Metal music results into bloated bitrates and a larger filesize.

When I tested 3.90.3 on some of my Metal tracks, a good number of them were a bit larger than what I had already archived on CD-R's using 3.92 files, some where 2MB+ larger. However filesize is trivial when interested only in the best quality MP3.

Your situation is different though - I suppose, although you could just fork out the extra $1 and use a second CD. Since you are wanting to restrict the filesize so that ALL your MP3's will fit on a single CD.

Look at the Recommended Settings page, invite your friend over and play around with different settings and see what is acceptable to his hearing.
For instance would it be alright for you to encode using --alt-preset standard -Y since it negates bitrate bloating. Would it be alright for you to use ABR (with the understanding acceptance that quality will not be as good as APS) --alt-preset 192.

EDIT: I'm too slow, 2Bdecided beat me to it.

LAME 3.90.3 also has --preset medium which will give you a lower bitrate than --preset standard.

--preset medium is actually a lot better than I expected. I expect many of you would be surprised

I have read in some post somewhere that preset medium, may not be better than the corresponding abr setting at the bitrate medium is targetting, which I think is somewhere around 160-170 kbps. Since your main interest is filesize predictability, you would probably (not 100% sure) get the best possible quality on one CD with an abr setting. Unless of course -Y and standard does it for you, then that's the best choice.

Thank you all, Iľl give a try.