Hi people

I`m kind of new to mp3 and have a question:

What are your favourite lame-settings for high quality music
you listen with a good stereo system and good speakers ?

I`m reading this board for a while and cosidering all the information I`ve chosen the following settings (for Lame 3.96 final):

--vbr-new -b 64 -B 320 --resample 48 -q1 -V 1 --lowpass 20000

I wanted something better than -preset standard, but not as much as -preset extreme.
I`ve chosen --lowpass 20000 because it`s approximately equal to the lowpass setting in -preset extreme.

Should I change something ?

Cu
Shingetsu

--preset standard, or in extremely rare cases, --preset extreme.

Then again I don't use MP3 anymore. I'm a vorbis and musepack user.

Lowpass at 20000 is futile by the way, as the human ear can't hear frequencies beyond 20000 hz anyway.

You need to read this:

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....findpost&p=1595

I can tell by your commandline that you definetly haven't read this forum at all!

Otherwise you'd know about the recommended LAME settings or have read some of the threads linked in the FAQ.

Your reply either needs to be an excuse or a post providing ABX results proving that --preset standard is not transparent to you (opposed to your own cmdline).

then you think "--preset standard" is good enough, even for high quality speakers ?

Personally, I use and prefer

--preset extreme -p -c --space-id3v1 --pad-id3v2

Basically it's all under the motto, "It's better to be safe than sorry."

the -c is the copyright-switch
why should it be used ?
quality gain ?

No, there is no quality gain. It's just in respect of the artists who created the work behind the MP3, that's all.

-p shouldn't be used either. It wastes bits on information that could easily be stored outside the audio stream in an MD5 or SFV file.

Is there an audible difference betwen --preset fast extreme
and --preset extreme
anyone had bad experience with "fast" ?

Absolutely! In fact you would probably find it easier to hear artifacts with cheap headphones then with expensive speakers .

edit:


IIRC the difference was mostly theoretical, however, I believe that the fast (vbr-new) setting can cause some problems. Personally I would go for peace of mind and use --alt-preset standard, the extra encode time isn't so bad if you batch encode over night.

From lame_3.96 --preset help

It seems from this that in the opinion of the lame developers, fast both increases file size and decreases quality - not good value in my opinion. You will probably listen to your mp3s hundreds of times, surely it's worth spending the extra time on encoding?

Personally, I used --preset standard on my good hifi speakers and good headphones and have found very few real world samples that I can ABX. I encourage you to go back and read the FAQ again.

Lame Devs - just noticed a couple of grammar errors in "--preset help" from 3.96 - do you guys accept trivial patches to fix such things?

Yes, please spot them.

English is not the native language of most Lame developpers.

I heard that the new vbr-argorithm has greatly improved since last releases.
So it is still not as good as the old ?

Why resample to 48 ?

Resampling can only hurt quality.(more or less audible)

if would keep them in its native sampling format and if neded to resample for som wierd reason, then resample at playback.
That way you file contains as much "transparancy" as possible.

thank you very much for your good advice.

This is my new command line:

--preset extreme --vbr-new -q0


The new vbr-algorithm is great. The files are as small as with old-vbr, but it is much faster ! Some old Lame produced too big files with -new-vbr but this problem is gone with 3.96.
The biggest mistake was --resample 48 because it was just a fucking waste of many kilobytes.

@Music Man:

I considered your words and looked for problem-descriptions in the docs.

Here it says:

"Invokes the newest VBR algorithm. During the development of version 3.90, considerable tuning was done on this algorithm, and it is now considered to be on par with the original --vbr-old."

So I guess there`s no audible difference betwen new and old, even if it`s just for "peace of mind".

My personal favourite:

oggenc -q 2

I don't like MP3.

http://pessoal.onda.com.br/rjamorim/picture83.jpg

Now let's go back to the topic: Lame.

for the few files that I encode (actually transcode from FLAC via fb2k diskwriter) in MP3 , --alt preset standard has been transparent enough for my ears. Anything above that seems like a waste to me personally as all of my valued archived stuff are FLAC usually.
was going to abstain from posting entirely (I usually do on these threads as my codecs of choice lie elsewhere) but will just leave it at my statement above.