hi everyone

anyone listen to power/prog metal and what is the best bitrate for this type of music? i heard metal needs higher bitrates like 256.

I'm no expert but in my highly unprofessional opinion metal could probably be encoded with lower bitrates than normal.

And when you say 256, what codec are you talking about? It would be overkill for most high-performing codecs, I think. Why don't you do some tests and figure it out yourself.

for mp3s, using -aps, my prog metal averages out at around 220 kbps. My experience is also that the metal genre requires more bits than other genres.

(PS: I have my Rhapsody albums stored losslessly )

In case you encode with one of the --alt -presets (recommended) the preset should automatically choose the right bitrate for the type of music you are encoding.

So there probably really isn't any need to worry about this yourself anymore.

This by the way should be valid for all codecs that use variable bitrates and preset levels for encoding (LAME MP3, Musepack, Vorbis, Nero AAC, etc.).

Metal and other 'heavy' music does indeed blow up the bitrates of LAME's VBR modes quite a bit, adding -Y helps a lot at the cost of losing almost all signals over 16khz.

cool thanks for the replies, i use the alt preset standard with EAC, what is -Y and how do i use it in the command line?

Use
--alt-preset standard -Y
instead of
--alt-preset standard

Some of my hardcore/screamo albums average around 240-250kbps, so if saving diskspace is important you this would be the first thing to try. The quality degradation is rather small, if you don't have a very sensitive hi-freq. hearing (like myself).

Another option would be to try LAME 3.96.1 instead of 3.90.3, which also slightly lowers the bitrate of --aps (-V2) on this kind of music.

If i'm remembering right, then it does remove most frequencies above 16KHz - it is a kind of "soft-lowpass" because it does not eliminate >all< frequencies above 16KHz(it keeps the most perceivable ones). It is especially useful if you are going to listen to the music in noisy environments, like for example outside - because the noise of your surroundings will "mask" frequencies above 16KHz anyways. So, it removes parts of the audio which are barely noticable by most people, and not noticable in noisy environments at all.

The reason why this may make sense is because high-frequencies to need alot of bits to encode them - so removing something which you won't hear anyways (in noisy environments) will in that case lower the bitrate considerably.

- Lyx

Just to give you some numbers I encoded a semi-random song from my collection (give up the ghost//young hearts be free tonight):

3.90.3 --alt-preset standard: 245kbps
3.90.3 --alt-preset standard -Y: 192kbps
3.96.1 -V 2: 209kbps

Of course this isn't 100% representative but should give you an idea what to expect.

Of course, the -Y switch works well with 3.96.1.

Just type: -V 2 -Y

This will render even smaller files. I use this for my portable

ok sounds good thanks agin i am new at EAC and the lame settings its good to know that there are people who know whats going on