Hi all,

after having spent a good few hours encoding some CD with iTunes-LAME --alt-preset standard a terrible doubt struck me:

Can mp3 players out there (I'm thinking about the Creative Zen Micro btw) decode Joint Stereo mp3s? It seems to me like they should but i can't find any info on that or VBR for that matter...

Gosh, I really hope i didn't waste all that time for nothing!!

Many thanks for your help,

G

If I did waste my time, does anybody know how to use LAME to re-encode the files from Joint Stereo to Stereo??

Yes.

Joint stereo is part of the mp3 standard. AFAIK all players can decode it. If any can't, they aren't a true mp3 player

same goes for vbr

Whereas there are some broken players (that call themselves mp3 players, but aren't really!) that can't decode some VBR files, I have never heard of an mp3 player that had any problems with joint stereo at all.

The most common mp3 encoder settings used to be 128kbps CBR Joint Stereo - no decoder would ever be released that couldn't cope with that!

Cheers,
David.

mmm.... interesting....

I got aan email back from Creative Tech suppot. Their Zen Micro supports VBR but not Joint Stereo...

A few comments/questions:

1) could the tech support guy be wrong? It is not unheard of that a tech support guy mith give the wrong answer, is it?

2) how can i find out if that's the case?

3) where can I fnind a list of players that support or don't support a certain feature? VBR and Joint Stereo being the ones I am most interested of course....


Many thanks again for your help! That was fast!

G

Tech support guy clearly doesn't know what he is talking about. Majority of files people have use joint stereo. If it didn't work, their player would be useless and it would be a widely known problem, which it's not.
I haven't ever heard of a hardware player having problems with joint stereo either.

A player without joint-stereo support would be unable to decode 99% of the mp3 files.

No one would dare to release such a player.