The time has come to re-encode all of my mp3's that are stored on my portable player, because i have now run out of space completely, and i have wasted much space in using settings that are way too high, on some music. For most, i have used -aps, which is a bit overkill for portable playing. I have tried re-encoding using megamix2 in ogg, and this works VERY well, but my portable does not support ogg. Lame seems to do VERY badly on transcoding, especially 3.96.1, as i have tested lame 3.96.1 against 3.90.3 and the latter wins every time. (yes i know 3.90.3 has been tested a lot more!)

Iv been trying different bitrates for my music to see which would sound best, and the best i have so far is lame --preset medium in 3.96.1. I have also tried -aps -Y which also works well.

My target bitrate would be ~128

I know transcoding is frowned upon here, but on this subject, i have no choice, because some cd's that i ripped from, I have now broken!

Does anyone else have any advice?

--preset medium

--abr xxx (where xxx is target average bit rate)

--preset medium

--abr xxx (where xxx is target average bit rate)

You could also try a lower lowpass to save bits for music you'll actually hear on a portable.

which lowpass would you suggest?

My portable is an Archos AV320. With sony fontopia earphones

Experiment and listen.

I find that the ABR presets don't sound as good as good true VBR preset. -V5 works well for 128 kbps average.

LAME 3.96.1 with parameters: -V5 --athaa-sensitivity 1

Wow, that's hard to do. I have been collecting CD's for about 15 years and have yet to break one. In fact, when I tried to break one, I found it to be quite difficult.

Perhaps you mean that they are so scratched that they can not be ripped properly.

In my experience, -V5 --athaa-sensitivity 1 averages too high, in the mid-130s. I just got rid of the --athaa-sensitivity paramenter.

Some are well scratched where my brother has written his name in them with a pin but some are broken, i have dropped a few, or rather droped things on them. Really need to be more careful.

Being an only child my instinctive response to this would be to write my name on my brother with a pin! (Don't worry, I won't pass this advice on to my kids!)




Yes, it would seem so! Many people rip their music so they can have CD-R mp3 copies for general use and keep their original CDs safe - maybe your opposite approach has some drawbacks! ;-)

Useful advice: if scratched on the underside, it's often possible to polish the CD to make it playable again. There are special kits to do this, but toothpaste, car polish, even very fine sandpaper followed by brasso, can work well. Anything is worth a try is the CD is already unusable. Even a good clean can work wonders - lots of finger prints will often cause more read errors than a few radial scratches. Unfortunately, if it's scratched on the label side, then the data is gone for good.

Cheers,
David.

A more enduring solution would be to rerip (with EAC of course) those CDs of yours to a lossless format of choice. EAC might even be able to save some of those damaged disks. I'd advise you to have EAC do the latter overnight, though, since EACing a badly scratched CD may take a couple of hours

A 200 GB HDD (costing 100 EUR/USD nowadays) will store some 600 albums in impeccable quality, allowing you to batch-reencode to any lossy format you like.

Just transcoding is not quite a long-term solution, I hope you realize that. Sure, going from 200 kbps -aps to 130 kbps -V5, as has been suggested, will be saving you 1/3 of your HDD space, but the quality will definitely suffer. Your 'new' 130 kbps MP3s just won't sound as good as they would if you'd have encoded them right from CD or lossless to -V5. What if your collection grows by another 1/3 and you run out of space on your portable once again? What if you decide to buy that shiny new 120 GB AAC playing iPod-or-the-like within a year or so, and if AAC will by then have proved to outperform poor old MP3, listening test after listening test? I hope you won't be having to reencode your music again by then.

So in short, my long-term advice would be to get a big HDD, rerip all of your CDs to lossless, totally annulling the need to ever rerip or transcode your music collection again. That way, you can go straight from original quality to the lossy flavour of the year.

My direct answer to your question would be to go for -V5 -h, since that's the highest quality LAME setting for 130 to 135 kbps MP3s. But try to look up the lowpass freq of your Sony earphones, and encode your MP3s accordingly. So, if your Sony phones have a lowpass of e.g. 18 kHz, I'd encode to -V5 -h --lowpass 16. I'd lowpass LAME to at least 2 kHz below your earphones' lowpass, since headphone manufacturers tend to exaggerate their products' lowpass specs anyway (especially in the low-end product range) and depending on how good your hearing is, you're unlikely to be able to hear such high freqs, especially with earphones (as opposed to closed studio headphones) and in a noisy environment. Don't forget the -h in your command-line, since that one stands for 'high quality'. -q1 or -q0 should provide even better quality than -h (which is = -q2), but my personal experiences with -q1 and -q0 are not too good. Both are vvveeerrryyy ssslllooowww at encoding and, what's more, have actually returned lower bitrates than -h/-q2 (only 1 to 3 kbps though), which made me sceptical about their higher quality claims.

Of course, it could very well be that -V5 already applies some lowpass of 16 kHz or anywhere near that by default. If so, I'm sure someone will confirm, and in which case, I'd recommend going even lower, like 15 kHz.

Anyhow: good luck!

Edit: Just gave it a shot at a couple of my own FLACs. Seems like -V5 defaults a lowpass of something like 16.8 kHz. So I forced the lowpass to 16 kHz, and that seemed to effectively bring down the average bitrate by a couple of kbps. So it looks like your target bitrate is in sight with -V5 -h --lowpass 16. -q1 in stead of -h also seemed OK speedwise, since encoding is relatively speedy @ -V5 as compared to -aps. Depends on how much patience you have It still produced files about 0.5 kbps smaller than with theoretically lower quality -h though. Oh, and don't forget about --noreplaygain to prevent LAME from applying gain to each track individually in stead of to the album as a whole.

Edit 2: Oh, and in order to get the full potential from the -V5 setting, I'd also recommend LAME v3.96.1 in stead of 3.90.3 or the like.

Hey don't jump on me i'm not a techy like you lot, but wouldnt it just be cheaper and safer to just store your cd's somewhere safe. I mean even large hard drives can go bad after a few years.

Sure, but it seems to me that that's for other threads to discuss (like this one, or this one, and also that one).

Well, thanks everyone for your replies. I think i should just clarify something. What you suggested polar, with a big HDD and the like? Well, iv already done that!!! lol. I have a 200GB HDD storing APE's of all my music. This topic was meant to be about my portable player. Its only 20GB, so i do need to re-encode. The only problem is, that before i ripped to ape's, i ripped to -aps mp3s, (before i knew about the lossless scene) so on the cd's that have broken, the mp3s are all that i have left of them.
About the lowpass - My hearing is up to 18khz and my earphones say that they go up to 23khz.

That doesn't mean you can detect a 17kHz low pass filter in real music.

See here:

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....findpost&p=6548

Cheers,
David.

I never stated that i could, I was only stating that with tests in cooledit etc, my hearing was up to 18 khz, and my equipment is 23khz.

Actually you can't hear "up to [n] KHz". Your ears don't just cut off cliff-like at a certain frequency...the roll-off in high-frequency perception is represented by a curve. As a result, choosing a lowpass goes beyond figuring out "how high you can hear". Because high-frequency tones are easily masked, you might be able to throw them away altogether even if you could perceive them on their own.