Hi,

in Germany I have been asked today, if -z could be used with ap fast standard.

I told, that z is a toggle switch, should only be used, if one knows exactly what he does...
I told, that he could use it with normal aps, ape, as these settings use vbr-old.
And that I don't know, what happens with fast settings, as these are based on mtrh vbr.

I told, that z increases sometimes bitrate and helps only in rare cases.

The need for eg. ap fast standard is following, the friend of the asking person has PII or AMD K II, 350 MHz, 5 minutes song would last 15 minutes encoding with aps, with ap fast s only 5 minutes encoding, speed one third.

Then I am interested myself for knowledge, if z could improve api, or if z would do even harm to api.

I wouldn't really recommend to anyone to use -Z. Most people don't know what it does and unless they have ever specifically heard a problem in one of their encodings, they probably haven't/won't notice a difference anyway.

One of the main reasons for not recommending this to people is that -Z does different things in different situations, for aps and ape it turns off noise shaping 2, for api it turns it on.

And as I've already said in the past, all of the named alt-presets use automatic switching between noise shaping 1 and 2, and this only fails in very rare cases. The solution isn't to toggle -Z and use noise shaping 1 all the time, rather what should be done is these people should report their problems to all of the LAME developers so that maybe someone will find enough time and motivation to fix the psymodel in places where it fails.

Many thanks,

not only from me, from the other guy, who did not want to use babelfish here, too...