I'm new to this forum, but i've been reading the posts here with interest. There are situations where you have to generate a low fidelity version of a track (e.g. for someone who's going to dowload it over a modem). I read in one of the FAQs that Fraunhoffer's encoder is better than LAME on the low bitrates, is this still true?

Nevertheless, i don't have Fraunhoffer. If i have to use LAME to encode a small file, this is what i've been doing (with 3.92): --alt-preset 40 -h -m m

Does this sound like a good setting? Or can you recommend me something better?

Thanks. Sorry if this has been discussed before. I did a search, but didn't find anything relevant.

g

If your not format restricted try WMA... if your not O/S restricted. I use it purely for generating small files that sound OK. I currently use WMA9 Two Pass VBR 96kbps... so far I am happy with the results as now I can fit 5 CDs on my portable flash player.

If sticking with MP3 I would stick with Fhg as LAME isn't tuned a great deal in the low bitrate region. I think it lacks intensity stereo (correct me if I am wrong), so quality at low bitrates does suffer.

Regards

AgentMil

Thanks for the response (and for the avatar!!!).

When you say Fhg, what are you talking about? Is this a commercial product, or freeware, or what? (Sorry for the stoopid question).

No problems...

Fhg is the Fraunhofer encoder. You can find it in MusicMatch, Cool Edit Pro 1 & 2/2000 and many other commercial audio encoding programs. Nero also includes the encoder in their Burning Rom software package.

Regards

AgentMil

Hi

This is my very subjective opinion, but sincerely I have never encountered a 64kbps (or less) mp3 file which sounds good to me. Depending on the encoder and music, either it's watery (ie: very distorted treble), or near-mono, or heavily lowpassed. I think the only loudspeaker with which it isn't annoying, is a soundbug (a device that attaches to a window, and uses it as a membrane)

Would wma or vorbis fit the bill for you?

WMA is the Microsoft format, right? Doesn't work for non-Windows people. Vorbis is probably the way to go, when it becomes more supported. For now there is still a need of low bitrate MP3s even though they're not Good. It's one of those "lesser evil" situations.

you should go with vorbis or HE AAC at that bitrate, at least if you take the results of the 64kbps test into account ...



see: HE AAC: 3.68 - vorbis: 3.32 - wma: 2.83

(vorbis is open source)

Fraunhoffer is FhG. You can get FhG by downloading www.musicmatch.com and using it's 128kbps (or a little lower) setting (you get good bang per bit for this). the unregistered version is speed limited but fully functional.

If you can use WMA and need low bit rates then WMA is relatively good at 64-96 kbps.

If you are just using your PC download Winamp 5 release candidate (beta) and you can encode in AAC (or use iTunes). However you may be using a hardware player that limits your choice of codec. If your not then an alternative to AAC is Ogg.

1. AAC/Ogg
2. WMA 64kbps if bit rate can be higher then
3. MP3 (at 96-128) FhG. Lame --altpreset medium is not as good as FhG 160 CBR to my ears, in fact 128CBR even has a slight edge

Experiment and see what you like.

Cheers,
Fairy

oh and the graph above doesn't contradict me (just seen the post) the LAME sample is at 128kbps the others are 64kbps

Ah! Thanks.

Sure, Vorbis OGG is really good. Hopefully it will be more supported soon.

g

Err... How low were you planning on going? Ogg Vorbis's minimum is quality level -1, which is supposed to be around 45kbps.

Unless you ask Garf really really nicely for his 4kbps Vorbis encoder.

Yes, but Vorbis at q1 (+1) can be significantly smaller than MP3 at that same bitrate. Now if everybody would install Winamp, or if Windows and Quicktime would start supporting the format, we'd be set!

Umm... smaller at the same bitrate ? are you sure ?


Let's face it: When taking most people's intertia into account: sometimes you have to push them a bit.

What about putting two links for your songs, labelled as:

- mp3 (low quality, 1040 kB)
- vorbis (good quality, 990 kB)

This kind of approach would advertise Vorbis as being better for the job. I think many people would go ahead, download the higher-quality version and spend the ~5 minutes to install a Vorbis codec.

Also many people already have winamp. I don't know of any single PC user who knows Quicktime and not winamp.

I like this approach. That's probably what i'll do. It uses more disk space, but what the heck. Doesn't Quicktime come with Microsoft Internet Exployter? Winamp comes with Netscape, but as an option.

Real Audio is reasonable at low bitrates too. But I think voribs is the best. You can do quality -1, 22050Hz stereo to get around 34 kbps. If you use ABR mode you can push that down to 30kbps. If you want to go below 30kbps then its between WMA and Real.

Basically MP3 is the only one everyone will be able to play, but it sounds really bad at modem bitrates. So you could offer MP3 and vorbis so you have a compatible and a qualtiy choice. Or WMA and Vorbis will cater for windows and *nix users.

Someone mentioned... how low do you want to go? For voice you can get down to around 20 kb/s with mp3 and still be ok... like AM radio with a minor amount of interference.

Use floggy.

I know this thread died four months ago, but thought glauber wouldn't mind another suggestion. I encode to MP3, primarily for platform portability, and use LAME APS as a matter course.

For lower quality encodes I've settled on LAME 3.90.3 VBR 8-96kbps, resampled at 22050Hz, mono. I am not tring to emulate ABR. I'm giving the encoder free reign between two extreme limits so that more complex music/voice will lean one way, and less complex music/voice will lean the other way. I get mean bitrates from 40kbps to 56kbps, which amounts to about 500 tracks of music per 700MB CD. I use this mode for 'hold music', emailing sample tracks, background music at outside venues, and mono audio books.

I know the stories about the Fraunhoffer derived encoders being better tuned than LAME at other than 44.1kHz, and when maintaining stereo. I've tried several codecs and encoders down at the lower end of the quality spectrum, and I found that LAME does quite well when resampling at 22050Hz, but not so well at 16kHz or 24kHz.

There will of course be several folk out there who will balk at this suggestion, but how many of them have actually tried it?

Hello, Lad,

thank you for the suggestion, i'll try it. I've been using Fraunhoffer, which definitely works better than Lame if you do CBR 32Kbit/s. Could you post the exact parameters you pass to Lame to get the encoding ranges you specify?

Thanks!

glauber

Consider using Mp3Pro.

It is (partially) backward compatible to MP3
(as AAC+SBR: with MP3 decoder you'll get a version, sounding comparable (or as horrible as:) to your usual (<=64kbps) lame encodes - lowpassed to <=~10kHz; But with special (proprietary) decoder you can reach verry good quality for this bitrate)

However I personally prefer Lame mp3 over MP3Pro with MP3 decoder at 64kbps



Positive:
There is a free WinAmp Mp3Pro plug-in
MusicMatch JukeBox plays it
all people could at least listen to LowQuality MP3-SBR part
there are free demo (64kbps only) encoder on Thomson site
Nero have Mp3Pro encoder


Negative:
not popular at all
no bundled decoder with winamp
IIRC, have no open decoders available
high license fees
proprietary closed MP3 extension with bad portable support(?Creative players only?)


Sorry for my bad English