I'm trying to keep up, but with a pregnant wife I can only read so much!

Anyways two questions. I'm using EAC and LAME.

1) How do I tell what version of LAME I'm running?

2) I want to use the Extreme standard (when I did some blind testing, that's what was transparent to me). I'm not concerned with encoding time, so I assume Extreme will give better quality than preset fast extreme (due to artifacts with the 'fast' setting). I currently have "--alt-preset extreme %s %d" as my command line option. With Lame 3.97b1 can I just leave it as that?

Thanks for the help!

With 3.97b, "fast" does not mean "faster at the expense of quality"...... there were even some reports of cases where "fast" did result in better quality.

The difference between fast and non-fast is that non-fast uses the older VBR-algorithm, while fast uses the newer one. Because everything currently points towards fast being at least equal to non-fast in terms of quality, there were some discussions about making "fast" the default, and abandon the older (non-fast) method - but it seems currently that the lame devs dont want to do it *yet* (probably because they want to do a bit more testing to be absolutely sure).

So to make it short: "fast" basically means "new and potentially better", while non-fast means "old but thoroughly tested"

During compression, the LAME window should have the version number listed right at the top, although you may have to scroll back up up to see it. Alternately, run lame.exe --help in a command window and it should display the version number along with the help output.

Programs like Mr. QuestionMan can tell you what encoder you (or others) used, which can be helpful as well.


Don't worry--you will have lots of computer time after the baby is born! <-- irony

Thanks for the tips. That Mr Question Man program is really helpful. So it seems the jury is out on Extreme Fast ... with indications pointing to parity, but I guess I'll hold off till those with more time decide.

Cheers

If you settled for "Extreme" then it means that you can hear more artifacts than most of us around here.

Why don't you ABX between VBR old and new?

You would win a lot of time using "new" which you will need once the baby arrives.