As part of my contribution to this board as the hopelessly uniformed and with regard to an interested lamer being able to take part in this discussion, I tried following the very interesting thread posted originally by jianxin yan entitled 'why can mpc be the best quality encoder?' which I really enjoyed - but which i read and then had to go and soak my head beacause just when I thought I was beginning to understand something about it all - that technical discussion blew me away - surely the basics of some of this could be diagrammatically represented - aaaah pre-echo, quantitisation, filterbank, transients - my poor head hurts

Now I can understand Dibrom and and r3mix and all the others working on the Lame project wanting to get things tweaked exactly right in terms of the presets, but in the meantime can someone authoritive suggest a set of switches or preset combinations to work at different bitrates (which perhaps could start off as a thread - and then maybe get transferred into the FAQ or format header section for MP3?)

I started a notepad file a little while back when the guys on the vqf.com/bbs board supplied me with the command line switches they used for encoding MP3 files for different types of music at different bit rates and for a while that was cool - because I knew that as far as that esteemed group could figure those were the best combination of switches about.

So on behalf of the guys out there that don't- sadly - always have the time regrettably to test the new Lame tweaks but who encode alot of music at different bit rates - could we have a guide? - even a simple set of suggestions along the line of:

to get the best quality sound at 128 with rock use these switches or presets
to get the best quality sound at 160 with classical use these switches etc.

This would be a really helpful source of practical encoding knowledge with lame - while the presets are being finalised

PS think of the fun and the arguments started while those recommended switches were being hammered out :]

Regards and thanks for the site - one of the first place I come in the morning

Bladeraptor

--abr 134 -h --nspsytune --athtype 2 [--lowpass 16] --ns-bass -8

This switch is going to make it into the next batch of --dm-presets though likely with a few modifications. For 128kbps average bitrates (you need to specificy 134 because nspsytune usually averages a tad lower) this is probably the best I've seen yet from LAME.



Well you might want to try --r3mix here. It seems to average somewhere around 160-192kbps or so. Quality is near 192kbps cbr (hasn't been shown to be better or worse really).

Beyond that (160-224kbps average) I'd use --dm-preset standard. Quality is very high, seems to be somewhere near 256kbps, maybe higher. In the AQ test, the reference sample (700kbps mpc) was not found to be significantly better perceptually to the average listener. That isn't to say that MPC isn't higher quality though (a few people can hear the difference, myself included).

Great idea; in fact, I'd been doing it for months now for my divx encodes (think of a handbook of what settings gave what sizes, how many settings did I try for each and every movie and why did I choose the winner). Every encode had its mishaps, but at least I knew where to start.
Sadly, me being a livin'-la-vida-loca type of person, upgraded to Windows XP with no backup and lost the file...

It's a cool idea. Combine a glossary for dummies with a series of settings so everyone can see the difference they make and that's a reading I would keep handy.

Hi,
What version of Lame is being used with these switches and why is the lowpass "bracketed"?

--abr 134 -h --nspsytune --athtype 2 [--lowpass 16] --ns-bass -8

auldyin

because it's a matter of taste whether to include this option or not. Whatever you do: Don't specify the brackets