In real-life terms, and just providing an estimate, what is the real difference in space used between encoding with lame and alt-preset-standard and alt-preset-extreme?

I mean, if I encode, say, 500 average CDs, is the difference a gig? 5? 10?

assuming an average album length of 1 hour, from my experiance aps would need ~40GB, apx (around 20% higher bitrate) close to 50

all very roughly of course

10-15% increase in filesize, in my experience.

wow is that all, i thought it was more. aps must be really tight.

Using extreme is pointless. Where aps is good enough, it's good enough.

In the pathological cases where aps really isn't good enough, ape doesn't help much.

In the types of sounds where very critical ears can hear small problems, ape only helps a little.

--alt-preset insane helps more (at the expense of a much higher bitrate!), and some small problems are cured by this "brute force" approach; others remain.

What other possible reasons are left for using --alt-preset extreme? Transcoding? It doesn't really help here either! (search for posts by "den").

The situation is less clear-cut for Musepack. Here I've been tempted enough to use extreme (q6).

However, for mp3 it's usually --alt preset standard (or, rarely, --alt-preset insane - if it's a problem sample but for some reason it _has_ to be mp3). There's no reason to ever use --alt-preset extreme.


but other people may think/know different...

Cheers,
David.