Yay, my first post here! I've been lurking on and off for a long time now and finally decided to sign up a few days ago. Now I have a simple question that I hope someone can answer. I've recently switched from LAME 3.90.3 to LAME 3.96.1 (both of which I am very happy with) and am wondering what the full command line equivalent of "--preset standard" and "--preset extreme" would be. I generally just go by the accepted wisdom and use these two depending on the album being encoded, but now I wouldn't mind trying my hand at some tweaking. Many thanks in advance all!

Read the FAQ

I'll even help by throwing a link out: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....=ST&f=15&t=3076

Welcome, and please read the FAQ thoroughly.

In LAME 3.90.3, there are no equivalent parameters for the presets. In 3.95 and newer versions though, the normal parameters also make use of the presets' source code.


See also:

• statement of Gabriel in "1km long command line VS preset"
• "-V n (in 3.95.1), safe to use?"

The FAQ seems to be outdated in this very topic, at least for newer LAME versions.

Thank you for the informative post Frank. I'm guessing it's safe to use -V settings other than the norm then (-V 1 for example)? Or is there more to it than that so that it's best to stick with the presets? One problem I have is that I can occasionally hear artifacts in certain songs (usually only with certain orchestal music, everything else is great) with -preset standard and don't really want to use -preset extreme if I can get away with it. FWIW, I listen most often on a pair of Sennheiser HD-570 headphones in a fairly quiet environment (considering getting HD-650's so my wife can have them though). Thanks again!

PS: Looked through the FAQ, interesting material but didn't really find the answer I was looking for. Thanks to magic75 and dreamliner77 anyways though since I totally missed it being way up there in the right hand corner of my screen (small text on my screen too). Figured there just wasn't one and your replies prompted me to look harder.

Short answer:

The presets do not map to any particular command line (like r3mix did). The presets contain code level tweaks that cannot be duplicated with command switches. In the 3.95+ presets were also mapped to some switches to remove some confusion.


Digisurfer: maybe you might want to think about a different format, musepack perhaps?

I was considering perhaps switching to FLAC at one point a while back since I think it is an interesting and useful format, but to be honest I don't really want to deal with the storage space issue at this point in time. FWIW, I've never really put much thought or effort into my occasional encoding before since I was always happy 99% of the time with the --alt-preset standard in 3.90.3 based on the recommendations here at HA.org. The reason it's become more important over the last several weeks is because I plan on buying a portable MP3 player (40GB iRiver or iPod) for my wife as a surprise birthday present since she is always complaining about not being able to listen to music at work. The DVD player we bought a few months ago also supports MP3, and because MP3 support is pretty much universal these days I decided it's simplest to just stick with it for everything. The portable will also be used by both of us in the car a lot which has a decent Pioneer setup, but no MP3 capability there yet obviously (a future upgrade perhaps). For me, I like to listen most often at my PC with the Sennheiser headphones I mentioned, which doesn't help much when it comes to DAE & encoding problems, since even minor ones can stand out pretty well at times (they are truly fantastic headphones IMHO). Plus I find I can be sensitive to them on certain kinds of music (the "warbles" as I call them, and pretty much anything high frequency). Anyways, it's been a ton of work, but I've managed to RIP about half of our CD collection using LAME so far, as well as redo from scratch all the ID3 tags for our entire MP3 collection. That was a mammoth task let me tell you, especially because I generally never bothered fussing around with tags in the past and never really considered them all that important. I usually just deleted them since I always felt folder & file names to be plenty sufficient. But now that I plan to get a portable device as a present I figured I had better do everything right. Anyways, I digress.

To come to the point (yep, there is one!), I was thinking that if the standard preset was good enough most of the time, and the extreme preset was overkill more often than not (but still considered good when needing a safety margin), then perhaps I could find a happy in-between and just use that for everything from now on. Of course, if you folks here don't think that is good idea then perhaps I'll just stick with --preset standard for most stuff, and re-rip with the extreme setting when I encounter problem songs. Kind of a pain, but I suppose worth it if the general consensus is that that's the best way to go. HA.org has always been the best place to find good, honest, trustworthy common sense opinions, and that's why I came out of the shadows to post my question.

Generally when you encounter an artifact at --aps, it's still gonna be there with extreme or insane. It's often a limitation of the mp3 format.

I've been playing around with LAME --preset extreme and am finding this isn't the case, but that only applies to me of course. I'm going to have to ABX to be 100% sure, but I'm starting to think that maybe --preset standard isn't quite as transparent to me as I originally thought. Part of the problem is due to the fact that I'm doing much more encoding now than I've ever done in the past, which may be why I'm noticing it more frequently. I think I may end up just switching to the extreme settings for everything from now on, and redo problem songs in my collection already done at -aps as I encounter them. This isn't so bad, as to me it seems like a good compromise between LAME and FLAC based on my specific needs. Hopefully using -ape instead of -aps will also improve tanscoding for a portable should I ever run into that problem down the road too. Plus -ape adds some peace of mind I suppose. Of course, I could just stop listening on good headphones too, lol.

If you wan higher quality than preset standard (ie -V2 in 3.96) but want smaller filesize than preset extreme (ie -V0 in 3.96), then of course you should use -V1 with recent versions.