My friend and I encode with LAME.

He uses a hydrogen build, I use the LAME that comes with CDEX (3.92)

I use variable bitrate, 128k low 320k high, q=2, VBR-NEW, VBR 0, 48000 samplerate. Sorry I cant put that as a command line, as I said I use CDEX and its a GUI.

He uses -aps 0 from command line.

Who is getting the "better" audio quality? Barring that, who is being entirely too concerned about quality when they both sound excellent?

Your friend wins.

go to here.

This has been discussed before. Here, at HA, 3.90.3 is the recommended version. 3.92 is basically the same code compiled with a different compiler option. So, in very rare cases, you might actually get a different encoding quality. I would suggest that you stick to LAME 3.90.3 since it is the most exhaustively tested and verified here at HA.org

Edit: Damn, people posted the answer as I was typing this.

You should read "Recommended LAME settings" on the MP3 forum.
The settings have been tweaked to death by the developers WITH QUALITY IN MIND.
And believe me, you cannot outsmart them.

Hmm, it's hard to say if one is really concerned about quality or not when they choose options other than (or on top of) the well-thought-out-and-tested presets.

Then why start this thread in the first place?

You have your answers already. A sensible person would take note of the answers given to him and work accordingly.

I must be getting outdated if I actually don't know what -aps 0 means.

Knowing him, he just went for a preset because he didnt want to fiddle with any settings, not because of quality

I used to command line and I did --alt-preset extreme. If its REALLY that much better than the settings I have been using, I will switch back to 3.90.3 and do it all by hand.

While a great guide, it is most unhelpful in actual comparison. I did see a thread somewhere where one of the --alt-preset's was expanded, but it was only one. Hell, I 'm not even sure what he means by -aps 0.

Also, that guide doens't have much help with CDEX and setting up a different LAME version, yet it says its the best. I dont get it

So... you joined HA today and you feel you can easly state that the FAQs are "unhelpful" regarding their ability to say something about quality comparison, disregarding the months (maybe years) of hard work of the senior members of this community (amongst which I don't even dare to put myself)...

OMG! where are we going???

Sergio

Well, whatever sounds good to you, and you're happy with, should be fine with anyone else. If you want advice or not is up to you.

Anyhow, you don't necessarily have to do everything by cmd line if you want to take advantage of the LAME presets...

(A) Been a long while since I've switched from CDex to EAC, so I hope this info is up-to-date... But from what I understand, you can use alt-presets (standard and extreme, at least) with CDex if you install LAME 3.90.3 according to this guide: http://www.users.on.net/~alexanderino/cdex/.

(B) You can also use a GUI frontend to process .wav to .mp3. Speek's "all-2-lame" is a great tool for going this route. http://members.home.nl/w.speek/all2lame.htm

-also-
If you're after lower bitrates and filesize than -aps affords, and would appreciate faster encoding (and often a slightly better compression), you might consider trying 3.96.1 . Personally, it's a trade-off I can live with, when doing lower-bitrate encodes. (although I don't actually percieve a difference in quality)

I think --alt preset extreme is overkill and a waste of space. Can you tell the difference between --preset extreme and --preset standard? Perform a blind ABX test, because I doubt it. Anyway, your setting is just crap...so stick with the presets (no addional switches!) if you care about quality...

Also, you should not use anything else than LAME 3.90.3 or every stable version >= LAME 3.96.1 . Since LAME 3.96.1 is the latest stable release, it's what I'm using.

change that from 48000 to 44100 to start with, CD's are encoded in 44100

Good god where do people come up with this stuff?

I have a 48000 soundcard, are you saying theres no benefit?

Drats.

I'm sorry that I don't meet your standards, but I'm pretty new at this. I'll try harder next time, sir.



I'm here to learn. Thanks for helping!

Thanks for the help. I probably will get the newer version and just command line it ( I find GUI's make me feel like I'm not actually doing anything ). I'll also try the blind test (as suggested by the guy below you, sorry I don't remember the handle) and see, but I have equipment a little better than a casual consumer, and I have a pretty good ear, so we'll see

I'm sure they did put a lot of work into it, but I don't expect them to analyze every single angle, and I didn't see anything that helped my weird situation.

Because we're geeks, and it's e-penis sizing up.

Apparantly he won, so oh well.

Sorry that was rude of me, I was just a little surprised that you managed to mix in that many switches without finding the presets. Its pretty clear in the documentation for LAME that the presets are better IIRC (haven't looked in a while so I could be wrong).

Anyway, don't resample. All that does is slow things down and hurt quality. If your sound card really doesn't support 44.1khz, and you don't want to upgrade to one that does, then you could use a resampler in winamp or foobar or whatever.

For actual encoding, just choose preset standard (alt-preset standard in 3.90.3). It should give you exactly what you want quality and bitrate wise. If its too slow, try 3.96.1 and preset standard. Its much faster and quite possibly the same or better quality (though this is still debated so I cannot say for sure).

Lol. :D
CD's are encoded in 44100, so do you really think your soundcard will produce an additional 3900 Hz of samplerate of an actual song by itself? :D
Pretend you're driving a cargo truck. If you replace your truck with a bigger one with brand name on it, will the cargo actually change just because of it?

CDs are encoded at 44100. That is what they are, they cannot be any "better".

Think of a movie in black and white. It doesn't matter if you watch it in a color TV, does it?

It is the same thing.

No quality increase will come from upsampling.

Oh, and the people that tuned LAME did consider every possible angle. Every music genre, and every situation. It is still being developed, but the quality of the presets is the absolute best that LAME has to offer in the diferent bitrates.

As I said before, unless you could CODE one of these things yourself, I don't think you could ever outsmart people like Dibrom, Takehiro, Gabriel who developed (among others that I cannot remember right now) LAME and its presets.

as already mentioned CD's are in 44100, so encoding it in 48000 will not to any good...actually it hurts quality since LAME is optimized for 44100. Also, encoding is not done through your soundcard. So it doesn't matter what soundcard you have the encoding quality is not affected by that...for encoding you don't need a sound card at all, only for listening to your music (in case you can't read the music from looking at the visual graphs )

I'm just wondering why hasn't the recommended LAME version moved up to 3.96.1? Hasn't that been used enough?

"I'm sure they did put a lot of work into it, but I don't expect them to analyze every single angle, and I didn't see anything that helped my weird situation."

I do not know why this still surprises me. That someone with only hours of experience on this board can state with assurance that they know more than the folks here who have labored for months and years on various projects and tested them exhuastively. I suppose these new folks also dispute their teachers and contest their grades. If they are working I am sure they also doubt their evaluations.

It is tough being the only person around who is in step.

leave your sample rate for the mp3's at 44100, you can always use a media player to upsample to 48000 for your soundcard

what happens if you get a soundcard later on that doesn't upsample to 48000, are you gonna reencode all of you mp3's again ?

keep it simple, --preset standard(--alt-preset standard) or --preset extreme(--alt-preset extreme)

<blanket response>
Thanks everyone, I am going to reencode to 44100.

<pointed response>
I will never not own a good quality sound card

I didnt say I knew more about them, and I'm NOT disputing that their settings sound the best.



To all:

Reencoding right now, thank god I only started encoding my CDs, as I got bored with the ones I already had done

If you think an upsampling sound card is "a good quality sound card", then you definitely have a lot to learn...

Good luck and good studies!