Sure, I'm new and I'm insane because of quality of mp3. Certainly all members here will execute me, beacause of this preset:

--alt-preset extreme -Z -k -p -V 1

Would you give me the advice rather using --alt-preset extreme -Z -k??

I think you're fed up with these newbies, but so it is.

why do you want to destroy the combination ape uses ?

Let's not waste our precious time with trolls

I disagree. You can't call someone a troll when he doesn't know better. This forum is here to help everyone getting the best out of his codec of choice, no matter if he used to use Xing or a weird LAME command line.

To GrauerWolf: I suggest using --alt-preset extreme -Z or plain --alt-preset extreme. -p is not doing any good (read this), -k and -V1 are messing with --ape too much. Rather use --alt-preset insane then...

Eeh, frankly, I don't think that -V1 or -V0 would mess up the quality tunings, but again comes the average bitrate issue.. It would be so high that one could rather just choose --alt-preset insane.

Sure the extremist of extreme vbr preset would be something like --alt-preset extreme -V0 -Z ,but the bitrate savings would be so small compared to insane that it's not simply practical.

Ok, thanks for your advices. I will usually use --alt-preset extreme -Z in future. And when I want to encode one of my loved and favoured CDs I will use --alt-preset insane instead of --ape -z -k -v 0.

-p will be deleted immediately. Unuseful, right.

Thanks! And be sure, answering any foolish question of a newbie helps u more, when this newbie encodes his mp3s optimal in future, and u can download these mp3s from him with WinMX. Good mp3s are rarely to find, so help if u can...

For two weeks I have used the --ape -z -k -p -V 1. Before I used no ape, I gave the following command line: -b 160 -m j -h -p -V 1 -B 320

I'm not sure, if I really want to know what u think about that....

So thanks again

I sounds to me like you should move ovre to the MPC camp

did you even try "--alt-preset standard" without anything else on the command line and see if you can actually *hear* anything better in "--alt-preset extreme" or not? Testing this theory with an ABX tool, of course, and not simply your *feeling* it being better or not. I sincerely doubt you'll need anything more than 'standard' since that's the whole design principle behind 'standard', for it to be all anyone needs.

@MTRH: No thanks, MPC is interesting, but no standalone players or other machines support it. Mp3 is famous and supported by almost everything today. If I used another codec, I would choose Ogg. This codec has future... However I think mpc is not bad!

@Shorty: I probably wouldn't hear a difference, but I really want to have the secure feeling of high quality - so it is - unlogical but satisfying!

That´s quite interesting :-)

So, an additional -V is still OK with the presets?

What about -q?

Could it also help?

I like MP3, but want the BEST MP3s possible - as much as possible near or better than MPC or Ogg :-)

Also, it should be VBR, because i dont like big files for just silence ...

Is there some documentation about such topics?

Thanx in advance :-)

The presets have been tuned so you don't need to do anything to them:

--alt-preset standard: very good overall quality
--alt-preset extreme: a little bit better than standard (on some samples, but not with most music)
--alt-preset insane: best you can get from mp3 without breaking the 320kbps max spec.

No need to modify them with additional switches, except:

-Y: will disable sfb21 noiseshaping, which can reduce the bitrate by a little or a lot and can cause ringing in some material
--lowpass: use a lower lowpass if you want

Don't fool around with -q. Using -V1 or -V0 won't hurt but it's not good practice to go overboard just for sake of going overboard.

If those simple parameters would improve the presets, they would be a part of them.

I´m going to use "--alt-preset extreme -V 0 -Z --lowpass 20.5"

Problem with pure ape is, that you get around 256kbps. It tries to save bits and does not always choose quality over saving such bits. I prefer to have more bits when i get more content, while still using VBR ...

I agree - I know I'm no pro, but I've been using the --a-p settings for as long as they've been around and the only additional flag I put after my --a-p extreme is the -F flag, as my portable doesn't like the 32kbps chunks.

I've never had a bad encode & could probably drop down to standard, for the transparency it offers.

I've been using regular --alt-preset standard for quite a long time, on some crazy musical material (analog synthesizers, sometimes encoding pure square waves, sine waves, pulse waveforms, white noise, weird combinations, etc).

It all sounds good to me. I can think of *one* time where extreme or insane was a little better (it was a strangely modulated white noise sample), and that was only with the Winamp equalizer *on* (no idea why, but it was mangling that waveform). When I turned the WinAMP EQ off, it sounded OK with --a-p standard too (still a bit metallic, but pretty good).

I am constantly amazed at how good --alt-preset standard is with 99.9% of music, and a lot of it at 192kbps or below. *Very* rarely do I hear even a slight improvement with extreme or insane (maybe if I were listening carefully for problems, I would find a few more). If you take the preset names as a hint, it should be obvious that there's no need to get extreme, and even less to go insane.

Edit (P.S.) if somebody wants that strange white noise sample for testing, I could donate it (but you'd have to accept LPAC format, I don't use FLAC).