Hello,

I'm lost with all the things that I can read on the net
I hope with this topic I will have actualized comments

For me NO MATTER IF THEY ARE OVERSIZE OR TAKE LONGER TO ENCODE.

1) What is best Stereo or join-stereo (I want to use with 5.1 surround kit)
2) Which lame version to use?
3) which preset is beter:
-b 320 -m s -q0 -p
-V0 -m s --vbr-new -q0 --lowpass 20,5
4) Do you recommend other presets?

Thanks in advance

Please read the FAQ and the pinned topics in the MP3-Forum. Every single one of your questions is covered there.

Well for me there are a lot of discussions but not really an answer :-(

The less lossless? Doesn't it mean "the most lossy one"?
It should correspond to -b4 --freeformat (4 kbps)

But if you're looking for the less lossy one, try either:
-b 320
-b 640 --freeformat (not compliant with most MP3 decoders)

Don't mess around with the stereo settings. LAME will determine the optimal stereo mode for each frame, forcing it to use one or the other will result in inefficient bit rate allocation.

I believe this is covered extensively in the stickies, but generally 3.96.1 is the preferred stable version, 3.97b also being used by some people (newer, but less tested).

Don't use huge strings of custom presets, the defaults are extensively tuned and are very rarely if ever worse quality than the custom strings. Even if an option will theoretically result in less loss, if can actually decrease overall quality by causing too much of the overall bit rate to be allocated to it.

-b 320. The only other option I'd use is perhaps --vbr-new.

Edit: You could use FF as guruboolez suggested, keep in mind that foobar2000 will not support it, Winamp's out-of-the-box decoder won't support it (I think anyway, I haven't used it in a long time), and most other media players won't support it. In my opinion the quality gain using FF is very limited, and not worth the compatbility issues. At 640kbps you're approaching lossless bit rates and you've lost the main benefit of MP3 (compatibility).

You mean --vbr-new on its own, right? Same thing as -V2 --vbr-new I guess?

As from my own thread struggling for best quality I don't beleive there will ever be a final answer mere to the fact that differences based on listening experience with very high bitrate are rare.

Nevertheless there are some answers.

Most important is that if you want best quality you should use cbr with 320 kbps. Current opinion usually says this is insane, but there are examples where cbr 320 is definitely better than -V0. You can't have an absolute security, but with cbr 320 security margin is pretty good.

Next to that IMO there should be considered that cbr 320 does not mean constant audio bitrate. Due to a concept called bit reservoir parts of the audio stream that are easy to encode can save bits that can be used on difficult parts (frames) of the music. This way difficult audio frames can get some 30% better coding resolution than can be achieved by simple cbr 320 usage without using bit reservoir.

As for bit reservoir usage there are some differences between different Lame versions. Current 3.97 unfortunately doesn't use bit reservoir at all with cbr 320. Moreover audio content of a 320 kbps frame fills up the transporting frame only to some 95%.
Lame 3.90, 3.91 does make use of bit reservoir. Audio content of a frame can be increased to some 130%. Saving bits for difficult frames however is restricted to 396 Byte whereas 511 Byte are possible (using 44.1 kHz sampling frequency).
Using 48 kHz sampling frequency allows for a saving of 480 Byte within bit reservoir which comes pretty close to the maximum of 511 Byte.
(you can upsample rather securely with foobar by first extending 16 bit 44.1 kHz samples to 24 bit 44.1 kHz, and upsample the 24 bit result to 48 kHz).
Lame 3.88b makes best use of bit reservoir.

Lame 3.90, 3.91 is famed for it's alt-presets, in our context (cbr 320): alt-preset insane (api). A lot of testing and tweaking has gone into these presets, and api is known by test to give good results for quite some cases where high bitrate vbr modes don't behave well. If you use api you use joint-stereo and nspystune as the psy model.
If you want cbr 320 without api details you can use -b320 -h. You will get stereo mode and gpsycho as the psy model. gpsycho is known to have the better pre-echo behavior, but there must be reasons why Lame development has abandoned it in favor of nspsytune.

Lame 3.88.b used with -b320 -h should behave pretty much the same as 3.91 -b320 -h as there has hardly been progression in the cbr320 gpsycho field in that time. 3.88b might be preferable to 3.91 gpsycho usage due to better bit reservoir usage on 44.1 kHz samples when avoiding resampling.
An interesting 3.88 version is Gogo 3.13 because it's very fast.

I personally think the best way to go considering quality only would be upsample to 48 kHz (if necessary) and use Lame 3.91. I have no idea at the moment whether api or -b320 -h is preferable.

I'll try a listening test - just ordered a good soundcard.

Huh?



http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=32288



http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=28123

Seems that would answer your question nicely.