Just wondering if the --alt-preset standard -Y setting is still the best for creating small VBR mp3s for a flash mp3 player. Is there something that makes great quality music at an even smaller size, or is this setting already pushing things too far (anything more would be noticable quality drop off)?

IMHO, --aps -Y is usually too big for flash portable use. If you are already going below a generally-accepted transparent setting (standard no -Y), I would use --preset medium. It's usually about ~25 kbps smaller than aps -Y and IMO, it's quality is good enough for portable, where optimal listening conditions are rare.

With 3.95 there is --preset medium (aka -V4). As preset standard is an alias for -V2, you might guess that there is a -V3 between both.

Why not to try APS 140 or 150?

There is no "APS 140 or 150". There are --alt-preset 150/160 (ABR), but those do not benefit of the code level tweaks, which have been done to the VBR presets (medium/standard/extreme).

dev0

If preset medium wasn't recently tuned, it could benefits partially of code levels tweaks which have been done originally ONLY for standard and extreme presets. See here.
I don't think that we can state for sure that --preset medium is better than --preset 160, this can be true with preecho cases but not always. Below ~160 kbps LAME VBR is known to be worser than ABR, we are just at the boundary line... maybe now with V3 the tunings will be less affected.

Hmm, sounds like there is no 100% clear answer about what to do here. Many different opinions!

I'm currently using APS on my 512Mb flash player. APS -Y doesn't yield enough of a shrink in size for my music to make it worth while, ABR 160 is a good alternative and sounds very good and yields files of the right sort of size. Basically it makes sense for your albums to average 64Mb in size and that way you can usually make best use of the space. So 128Mb player stores 2 albums, 256 stores 4, 512 stores 8. Of course some albums are bigger some smaller.

The above is my own opinion, and I don't achieve this target with APS, but I may start using ABR 160 again as it brings the target into range and sounds fine.

Cheers,
Fairy

Um yeah, that sort of stuff seems to happen when people start thinking for themselves.
Annoying huh?

Only your ears can decide but you have three main option:

1. APS (-Y or not, why bother)
2. preset 160
3. preset medium

Personally I rate them in the quality order given above, and am tempted to use preset 160 more on my solid state player because it gives a good trade off between size and quality.

Cheers,
Fairy

Corrected several hard-to-read abbreviations in the post. Please keep our forum clean and readable, thanks.
- moderation

Well, for what it's worth, I don't compromise sound quality for a portable. I have Sennheiser headphones for my portable, and I want transparency when I am on the treadmill.

I have old ears, and at one time I thought I could not hear above 16Khz, so I used APS -Y. It sounded muddy, muffled to me. I did some more tests and found I could actually hear up to 17Khz, and maybe a little bit beyond. Now I use -aps --lowpass 17600. I use that for everything. I do hear a difference on my hardware. The filesize averages 204kbs on my music.

The point of this is, if you care about quality, why compromise for a portable? You don't have to, unless you are that worried about filesize.

I own a HD based mp3 player myself so I'm fine with leaving the alt preset standard setting alone to do it's thing (I often use extreme actually).

I'm checking this out for a friend that uses a flash rom player. I think he uses 128kbps CBR. Hell maybe he'd even be better off using an average bit rate of 128 or something to give a little more quality where needed.

I think the other thing that is a big deal is simply how good your headphones are. If they are cheap I bet the 16khz barrier is not a big deal.

Anyone know what the 3.94 -preset portable is?

H

--preset portable in 3.94 alphas is just a synonym for -V5.

It was removed when 3.94 reached beta. I'm not sure why, I guess Gabriel just decided against it. But of course you can still encode with -V5.