Hello everyone !

I'm looking for software to compare codecs or to analyse audio (before and after compression graph) , i currently use paz plug in sound forge, but it's not for encoding audio.

I know there must be something out there to do that,

i'm also looking for a bit of explanation on ms stereo , mid side stereo (in joint stereo)

when lame switch to js is it giving you less phase ? or separation ? when is use -md it's giving me more phase . Well when i encode loud music with high transient (i.e nin things falling appart)







my settings for NIN things falling apart - truly transparent to me

--freeformat -b560 -h -md -k --athtype 2 -Z -p

sickamongthepure
Audio's Future Engineers

The best thing to compare codecs should be your ears - i mean you should do listening tests because your own ears are the only true indicator for (subjective) quality. And isn't audio compression all about subjective quality in music? Here a link for informationen on Mid Side Stereo. Edit: ff123's HP for information on blind listening tests

greets
David

The problem is that graphs don't tell you how it sounds. Degredation you see in a graph doesn't always correlate with what you actually hear when listening to the file because with these graphs you cannot take into account psychoacoustic effects.



Joint stereo doesn't exactly work that way. It's not meant to degrade the stereo image implicitly, instead it uses a bit of a "short-cut" in terms of representing redundancy in the stereo field in a more efficient manner. That's obviously a gross overgeneralization and not entirely accurate, but to explain it fully would take a lot more text than that. If you're really interested in how it works, you could probably find more information on it at Gabriel's site at mp3-tech.org.



Just a few things. --athtype 2 should be defaulted on that command line, so it's unnecessary. Also, -Z will probably do the opposite of what you are thinking there. -Z does something different when it is not used with the --alt-presets. It's not an on and off switch like most people think, it's a toggle switch. The setting it's toggling is set different with the --alt-presets than with the command line you are using, and if you're are looking for more accuracy (less agressive noise shaping), then you don't want to use -Z in your case.

And finally, if you're already giving up compatibility with portable players and most other software by using such high bitrate freeformat, you'd do much better to use a format like MPC. You'd be able to get higher quality than what you'll get from you current command line at a far lower bitrate. For example, no matter how high the bitrate, MP3 has certain problems which cannot be overcome like too long of a short block to prevent pre-echo, etc..