I just pulled down a copy of LAME 3.96 compiled for Windows and overwrote my old copy of LAME 3.93.1 (made a backup of old directory). I pointed RazorLAME to the new executable, and encoded something using the exact same settings as before (-b 160 -m s -h --lowpass 19.5 -q 0), and found that it was compressing at about 1/3-1/2 the speed of the previous version that I was using (from the same place, if memory serves - one of the recommended sites from the LAME links page).

Looking through the revision history, I don't see anything to indicate that the encoding process should've gotten drastically slower. All of the changes since 3.93.1 appeared to be either to improve quality or to _improve_ speed. I saw no mention of slower operation.

Is this normal? Has LAME been getting slower with the new versions? Do some of the pre-compiled versions have issues that others don't?

FWIW, I'm running an AMD Athlon XP 2400+ in Win2K Pro, using RazorLAME 1.1.5

-q0

LAME 3.94 beta December 15 2003

* Takehiro Tominaga:
o fixed block switching of nspsytune
o best huffman divide in the inner loop. This should improve the quality, but PAINFULLY slow. So it is not enabled by default. Use -q0 to use it.

Isn't -q0 supposedly some really unncessary switch that makes the encode only slightly better at the expense of a great loss of speed? I don't usually encode to mp3 (well ever anymore) but I don't remember.

EDIT: indybrett beat me to it and with more information.

If only people would just use the presets...

Thanks, indybrett. I missed that looking through the change log. I was primarily focusing on the blue text, since it was supposed to hilight all changes that affected speed, and secondarily on the red text, since it hilights quality changes, but I must have glossed over that since it's in black (except for the "best huffman" sentence).

Now I guess I need to decide if I want to sacrifice this speed for a bit of incremental quality... I probably will, being a bit too much of a perfectionist.

Yeah. --alt-preset standard was always pretty nice to me when I used it. Extreme seemed overkill to me and I even like a lot of headroom.

Perhaps since you're wanting a bitrate of 160 --alt-preset medium would be worth a try. Just a suggestion. Or at the very least --alt-preset 160 for a 160 abr file.

I suppose you could say that I'm a "tweak junkie." It's rare that I ever use a preset, especially if I can eek out a bit more performance (quality moreso than speed in the case of A/V encoding) by playing with the advanced settings.

However the LAME presets are code optimised so really at the risk of being wrong my understanding is that they are the best that LAME can offer.

I'll dig through the documentation a bit and look at the presets. Thanks for the tip!

List of Recommended LAME settings is probably the best documentation on LAME settings available. A lot of people have put in a lot of time doing blind tests to ensure that these are the best settings available for LAME.
Don't think of the presets as an easy way out for beginners. They are there because they have been very carefully calibrated to sound as transparent (or not offensively bad in the case of bitrates less than 128k) as possible.

The problem is: those command-line switches you mentioned do not improve the quality at all.

We already discussed something similar last week:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=23839

I advise you to use the --alt-presets if you use 3.90.3, or use the -V x parameter if you use 3.96 and nothing else.