I recently got a new cell phone that can do MP3 ringers and I've been playing with some custom rings for various different people calling me.

Since it's limited in space, ideally I'd want the lowest size files possible. So the first thing I tried was to grab some WAVs off a CD and do this:

lame --preset 64 input.wav output.mp3

Problem was that when I transferred the file over and tried it, it had weird dropouts. I'd heard these before in other circumstances, and the problem there was that LAME defaults to MPEG II instead of MPEG 1, because it resamples down at that low of a preset. So I tried again:

lame --preset 64 --resample 44.1 input.wav output.mp3

This worked, but given my song, it produced a file that averaged around 68 or so. Meh, the ringing speaker quality on the thing isn't all that good, so I tried again.

lame --preset cbr 64 --resample 44.1 input.wav output.mp3

Works fine. I went a bit lower, down to 56 and 48 and 32, and depending on the song I try, some of them are better than others. 32 is a very nice filesize, but the quality really seems to suffer badly there, on all samples.

So what I'm asking is what lame settings would be good to produce a file that is as small as possible, but which might sound reasonably acceptable on a low quality cell phone ringer output? And which also keeps the resulting MP3 as an MPEG I Layer 3 file, not jumping up to MPEG II?

From what I remember of the MP3 spec, MPEG1 Layer III supports sample rates of 32k, 44.1k and 48k. So you could try resample to 32 and it should stay Mpeg 1.

Hmm. Never even thought of that. I'll give it a try.

I haven't experimented very much at bitrates this low but I would think that -V8 or -V9 (with --resample 32 if needed) might be worth a try.

If you have one of the cheaper [cough]rolas, it will only handle CBR. I prefer 22100 kHz up to 64 kbps.

His initial command line was ABR so I think Otto's phone will play VBR files. However, his phone can't play MPEG2 layer 3 only MPEG1 layer 3 so he cannot use a 22.1 kHz MP3. Also its either 22100 Hz or 22.1 kHz; 22100 kHz is a little out of the range of a human ear .

Yeah, it seems to do VBR okay. It's a Motorola Razr.

By resampling to 32khz, it plays fine and sounds much better. I ended up going with CBR 48 for the two songs I was trying to put on there. That seemed to be the point above which where I didn't hear any noticable quality difference.

I will try those low V settings as well and see how that works.

Oh, I just realized that you might not be encoding in mono which would surely be preferrable in this situation. So you could try adding -m a.

Here is a guide to making mp3 ringtones for Moto phones. It was written for the vxxx series but should work on a Razr as well.