I've been an oggvorbis user for encoding to listen on my PC. I like how the default setting gives excelent quality (also VBR) and how stable it has been. But... my brother bought a MP3 car stereo and so I am back int the LAME arena. I encoded a lot of CDs using the latest stable LAME (3.96, right?) using the lame --preset standard, to my surprise, the full Coldplay Parachutes CD differs only 2 MB in size in Vorbis (q-4) vs. MP3 (--preset standard), so I'm quite happy I'm not wasting a lot of space (on average).

Questions
- Is Lame 3.96 recomended? A pinned thread in thes forum says only use lame 3.90.x and all others are experimental/broken. the thread is quite old (2001).
- There are a bunch of articles and comparisons that show MP3 is consistently worse than other codecs, to what extent does the --preset standrad conpensate that with fine tunning?
- Is Mp3 techically inferior to codecs that appeared later or a better/maintained implementation can get better sound from it?

Thanks.

3.90.3 is officially recommended. Inofficially, 3.96 should be fine. The main reason why 3.96 isn't officially recommended is because in blind-listening-tests, it was not worse than 3.90.3 but also not better (except at mid-bitrates like 128k). Since 3.90.3 was tested in a bigger scale the decision happened that 3.90.3 was kept as the officially recommended version because of the larger testing. So in short, 3.96 should be okay - 3.90.3 has a higher safety(because of more testing) while 3.96 is much faster and achieves slightly lower bitrates at preset standard (5-10kbps less on average).

preset standard is "transparent" so there is nothing which can sound "better" - but other codecs can achieve transparency at lower bitrates than lame-mp3.

Search the forums for the latest multiformat blind-listening test at 128kbit.

- Lyx

edit: to me, it seems that lame 3.x has almost no room left for further improvement. However, for lame 4 there is a new psychoacoustic model in the works and i do not know how high its potential for improvement is - and god knows when lame4 will be released - could be years or something like that. In general, one could say that other formats have much more room left for improvement/tuning.

Vorbis Q4 averages to approx. 128 kbps for me, while LAME PS taneds to average around 192. How'd you end up with Vorbis Q4 and LAME PS encodes running about the same size?

Also something to consider:

alt preset standard maybe a little overkill if the mp3's are 'only' going to be used in an automotive setting.

Indeed. I think a lot of users would find it hard to ABX --preset medium on most samples, and that's with headphones in a quiet environment, let alone in a car.

Do you re-use these mp3s somewhere else? Otherwise I'd say standard aka -v 2 is complete overkill.

I'm driving a vauxhall nova (at ~80kw so its quite loud) and my settings for car+lame 3.96.1 are:

Minimum: -V5 -b 80 --vbr-mtrh --athaa-sensitivity 1 -q 0
Medium: -V4 -b 96 --athaa-sensitivity 1
Max: -V3 -b 112 --athaa-sensitivity 1

I'm still testing but found, that minimum setting is quite alright.