I do this to make files for my mp3 player.
Theoretically there are definite sympathetic/unproblematic aspects to transcoding
along side the potential hazards such as reported complications that might arise
from eg repeated low pass filtering.
fwiw I theorise that as long as often mentioned, but rarely defined potential double processing side effects are avoided, and a sensible preset is specified, there may be little extra degradation in sound quality from transcoding down than the reduction in bitrate itself implies.
Your commandline of -b 128 -m s -h
could cause problems because -m s -can require much more
bits than the default -m j , joint stereo, which is reported to be solidly transparent
and is highly recommended, so by disallowing lame to use this mode when approprate it will likely choke the available bitrate leading to audible artifacts in difficult parts of the songs.
I get nice results with using foobars automated conversion component.
using the high quality polyphase resampler to convert to 32Khz and send
that to lame using -b128 --cbr. (folks liking 128cbr mostly dont mind 32Khz bw ; )
The resampling hopefully takes care of any problem with repeated lowpass,
or -k could possibly be used to disable bandwidth filtering altogether, but it sounds ok to me and there are reported benefits of having a transitional end to the frequency spectrum, which lame uses for 128 cbr.
Feeding lame well resampled 32k audio should allow it bitrate headroom when encoding to 128 cbr as lame doesnt automicaly resample to 32k until <100 kbs.
The goal is to not reinforce any existing artifacts by making sure its not trying to squeeze too much bandwidth into too little bitrate.
It might be advantageous to turn off other effects such as temporal masking.
but for each effect disabled more bitrate will be required to avoid artifacts.
hth
The results of transcoding using lame -b128 --cbr using this method are fine to my nonaudiphile ears and gear.
I really think resampling isn't a good idea, and I think lowpass isn't the only thing that needs to be taken into account.
I'm pretty sure I'd be able to ABX 44.1kHz vs. 32kHz. It'd probably be non-transparent for me.