Hi,

Last Week i ripped ca. 30 cds with the command line -b 192 -h -m s. Now i heard of the --alt-presets and have ripped the rest of my collection with --alt-preset cbr 192.

Should I ripp the cds which i have ripped with the -b192,....... command line new with the alt-presets or is there no really big difference? Sure, alt-presets give a better quali but the quality differnce can't be so big, can it?

Greets from germany

If I were you, I'd encode my cds with --alt-preset standard. There is a really big difference, and the bitrate should be more or less the same (it's VBR, so it varies from one file to another).
Greets

Hi, I have already tried to encode with --alt-preset standard, but I think that CBR MP3s have better Quality than VBR's. Another Reason for Using CBR is that it is Stanard in the MP3 Scene and VBR's mostly aren't accepted. The third reason is that a lot of MP3 Plyaers (HiFi & Car Audio) have problems with VBR.

But I'm wondering about the Average Bitrate of VBR MP3s. With --alt-preset standard some mp3s have 200kb/s, some only 140. This doesn't seem very logical to me because 200kb still aren't CD Quality. It would be more logical if the Average Bitrate would always be 192kb...

Greets

THat woulde be against any theory about VBR and the simple purpose of VBR.

VBR use bits where the gives most quality per bits.
on silent passage it woulde save the bits and then later use them on some complex music. thereby increasing the average quality of you file


I would suggest you read around in the forum as it will give many answer on the rest of you post.

and WHAT is exactly the mp3 scene ???? and why woulde you live with bad quality because some say to go CBR ?
you woulden't jump of a cliff if the "mp3 scene" did...would you !?!
what if the "mp3 scene" suddenly chossen to use WMA

1. You think that cbr has better quality than vbr. What makes you think that? The vbr paradigma: use more bits when more is needed and less when the signal is easy to encode. Imagine this: you encode a signal in vbr and at a certain point the encoder says: that part needs 320k but the overall average is ca. 192k. If you would have encoded the whole signal with 192 cbr, then that part will surely sound worse than the vbr pendant. --alt-preset standard is proovably better than 192k cbr stereo mp3s.

2. "The scene" is sometimes wrong because "it" doesn't allways do objective testing. Many people of the scene are too thick headed to admit they are wrong. Ergo: you shouldn't give a rat's ass about what the scene says. If you want to share mp3s, why should you want to contribute them to the scene anyway? They may not have the scene's seal of approval, but I would be more concerned about the quality of my own music than what the scene thinks of it.

3. Vbr is as much part of the mp3 standard as is cbr. If you allready have a player that can't handle vbr files, then using cbr is justified. Otherwise I would add "can play vbr files" to my list of criteria for buying one. You are just artificially limiting yourself.

About the average bitrates. Some music is just easier encoded than other music. Think of the 2 extremes. Silence vs white noise. Silence contains no sonical information and thus you need practically no bytes to represent it in any form. On the other hand, a sonic signal can't carry more information than white noise. If you reduce the amount of bytes you use to describe white noise, you will loose some of the information.

Now your everyday music won't be complete silence or noise of course but someplace in between, which explains the varying resulting bitrates. Your zip files also vary in the compression ratios. Does that make you wonder as well? The principle is the same: remove redundancies.

Sorry, if I don't make all that much sense, I feel very tired atm.

1. VBR mp3s always sound better than CBR. It is very logical, don't you think ?
2. Give a da** about what the so called scene tells you. They even use Blade because of it's tonal purity. Would you use blade now ?
3. Well then you can't call those players mp3 players, as VBR is part of the MP3 standard!

Why would it be logical if the average bitrate tends to 192 kbps if the song only needs 140 to sound transparent

I'm not really going to get too much into detail because it's not really worth my time arguing, and there are so many threads on this board already which cover this information, but basically, it doesn't make any sense that you would trust the --alt-presets enough to use them for CBR, but not for VBR.

As the creator of these presets I have stated many times that the CBR presets are nowhere near as good. They don't use any of the code level modifications that the VBR presets use, so in essence, they are no more than an "average" command line. In fact, they aren't even really the "best" as far as CBR goes. Because they don't use code level modifications, they can't always overcome the weaknesses nspsytune sometimes has like the --alt-presets can. So in some cases, other command lines will be better than the --alt-preset cbr modes (on a per sample basis of course). This isn't to say they aren't good comparatively, but they are absolutely nowhere near as good as the vbr presets.

If you do any sort of listening test with an even remotely difficult sample, you will hear this first hand.

So to sum up, you're kind of missing the point and wasting your time if you are encoding for quality purposes, and you think that for some reason the cbr modes are going to be higher quality than the vbr modes. They are nowhere near as advanced, haven't been tuned nearly as well, and just plain aren't flexible enough.

I'd suggest spending some time reading some of the threads on the design of the alt-presets. You can find most of these through the search tool. There's quite a bit of information about how the alt-presets work, what they were designed to do (and fix), etc, etc.

Well, without getting into details, mp3 scene is a bunch of deaf and silly people.

You're right...i will try it later to ripp some cds in VBR. If they're really much better I will stay at VBR. But then it's also bad that all CD Rippers, like CDex, have as the standard setting cbr 128 stereo...so every newbie ripps like that. But if i rencode then I will use the next best than standard...

Thanks, Greets and Sorry for my "good" English *g*

wait... what are you reencoding? i don't really think that's a good idea

edit: oh. is it encoding or reencoding? i'm assuming that there's a typo in there somewhere

I think he meant to redo his encodings from original source.

Right

using "--alt-preset standard" is really all that's necessary, there's not a whole lot of point in using the next one up, "--alt-preset extreme" as the person who takes care of the --alt-presets would tell you himself. 'standard' is meant to be the one for everyone to use, and 'extreme' will very very rarely give you any better results, let alone easily distinguishable differences. 'standard' should do the trick for you.

<edit> 'extreme' also uses up more bits, for pretty much next-to-no-difference, almost always not worth it.

Yeah, what _Shorty said is pretty much true. --alt-preset standard is really pretty much designed to sound as transparent as possible. It follows the same philosophy as mpc --standard in that regard (though unfortunately MP3 and the --alt-presets can't do nearly that good of a job ).

owned

Hi, I encoded now three CDs with EAC + Lame--alt-preset standard, the sound is really very good. Lame encodes only with 3-4x speed (with my old settings -b192 -h -m s it ran 12-13x), but that isn't very important. The Quality is really good, thank you a lot for giving me these hints. A lot of Tracks got very small, especially Bonus Tracks, which have some minutes silence at beginning, because Lame encodes there with 32kbit.

Greets

I've gotta admit... I was a reluctant convert to VBR myself at first (yes, it took me awhile to get used to seeing 'strange' average bitrates displayed in WinAMP, LOL).

Also, it was just simple inertia, and not wanting to change (human nature, maybe). But in fact, in many cases I'd use 256k or 320k CBR simply because of my VBR avoidance syndrome (so I can relate). There is something more secure feeling about the concept of a fixed bitrate (maybe it's the "at least you know what you're getting" thing that brings so many people to McDonald's restaurants ).

Cheers,

fewtch

There are also the "fast" vbr presets, which are almost 2x as fast as the normal ones, but if you say the speed isn't a problem then I wouldn't really recommend them because they are a little lower in quality than the non-fast versions usually.



Np

Alright! Way to go!
Are you ready for the next step now?

You have 2 choices, Ogg Vorbis or MPC.

And yes, you will have to reencode

Well, this is only true for medium/high bitrates (quality levels). At low quality levels seems that Lame does better with ABR and FhG does better with CBR.

Hi,

I have no encoded 10 CDs with Lame VBR. I can now also see the Sound Quality Differences of the different CDs, because one Album also has more than 200kb, some have only around 160-170...

I tried to rip one track 2 times and encoded both with the same parameter (alt-preset standard), but the first one is a little bigger than the 2nd and has one kb more per second. Is that normal?

Greets

Definitely not! Check the settings of your ripper. (Or did you add id3 tags to one and not the other?)

Hi, no I didn't add any ID3 Tags.

But the settings are corect...I use EAC, have a Ricoh MP7163A , Accurate Stream and C2 activated. Read-Out Speed is about 20x...

PS: I tried it with some other CDs, now the Files are equal bit for bit

I tried now to ripp one track from my cd-rw (Ricoh, Secure Mode) and one from my DVD Drive (Artec 16x DVD, Burst Mode), now the mp3s are a little bit different...

And i have ripped one Album, and the bitrate is nearly at every track just about 128kbit...is it able that this is a bug? Cause the songs on that album have base, snar drums, vokals etc...

Greets

Maybe the CD is damaged (scratches, etc.) which could cause problems (especially in burst mode). Two different drives have different offsets, i.e. the read waveform is moved by a few samples in one file relatively to the other one.


Is it Mono? Does it sound damped?

Hi,

no it sounds ok, and it is, as far as i know, stereo.

PS: I just saw that the Album is recorded very quiet, the base is load, but vocals and snares are not so...

How can I find out if the CD is recorded Stereo or Mono?

Check the encodings in Encspot and look at the percentage of MS and SS. If it's like 98%+ of ms, then it's probably mono or very near mono.

Hi, thx, it's mostly 100% MS, only a few tracks have 90% ms and around 10% ss. Then every thing is ok, this will be the reason why the bitrate is so low

Tangent,

I'm afraid I don't understand. My PC is not connected to a good stereo system, so unless I want to sit in a hard desk chair listening to music, how do you suggest I listen to Ogg Vorbis or MPC?

I'm afraid it's all in the hands of the hardware manufacturers. Very few seem to realize that formats other than MP3 don't stand a chance without widespread hardware support. No matter how much better it sounds, if I can't listen to it in the car or on my portable player it's almost worthless.

I kind of commented on this in my other post, but both of these problems can be fixed, even right now. You can obtain portable devices which will play more formats than mp3, and you can build systems in a car which will play other audio formats. Of course, they require much more effort than trying to do the same thing with mp3, but it's not impossible, and it may just be worth it for people who need something higher quality than mp3.

Dang it, I just re-ripped my entire collection with 3.92 using EAC and aps. I am NOT switching formats now!

Hi, I will also stay at MP§, the sound can be very good, i don't need more. And the hardware support is today very good fpr MP3.

I'd say AAC.
if you want portable high quality