I am wondering what all the things highlighted means, what options I have to change these settings, and do they make any difference if they are changed. I have absolutly no idea what the Long, Switch, Short thing means.



I understand the bit rate part that is highlighted, I just am interested in what the *'s mean and what do %'s mean. Are they the same thing or different and what do they stand for?

You don't need to explain every little thing here, just tell me the basics of the stuff highlighted and possible links to places that explain it more.

CPU features such as those mentioned (MMX and SSE) are multimedia optimisations that improve performance. Another example would be AMD's 3DNow.
play/cpu is (hope im getting this right) the speed in which the computer is encoding at. 1x being realtime. The "*" shows bit rate distrubution, which frames are 256kbs or 128kbs since your encoding a VBR file.

Something to add on the wiki perhaps?

CPU features denotes which CPU features are being used so that the encoding is a bit faster.
The lowpass filter is a filter that lets low frequencies pass through, while attenuating frequencies higher than the cut-off filter. The transition band displayed shows you the range of frequencies that smoothly fall, while everything above that is simply filtered.
As far as I know, the 13x figure tells you the compression ratio or something and qval is the quality.
That 6x figure tells you that LAME encodes 6 times faster than the duration of the song. So, a 6 minutes song would be encoded in only 1 minute.
The big block you highlighted stands for the bitrate allocation, * being simple stereo frames in case of joint stereo coding and % being mid/side stereo frames (or the other way round, not sure right now).
Finally, long and short blocks are something too techy.

Everyone else seems to have covered everything except the long / short blocks bit. The mp3 data is divided into chunks, which are the blocks. Normally the encoder uses long blocks, I believe they are more efficient. But sometimes it needs to use short blocks, generally in more difficult areas that have sharp transitions. One old mp3 encoder (xing v1) never used short blocks at all, and thus sounded very bad when fed these types of sounds (the famous example was the problem sample called "castanets").

Most of the things you have highlighted you can't change, and other stuff (like the lowpass filter) you shouldn't change. The presets are there for a reason, stick with them. The verbose output screen tells you a lot of stuff about what the encoder is doing, but most people should look at it only for entertainment.


The other way around. If you notice, below the graph there is "MS %" which is for mid/side, and it shows 100% in this case.

I should have figured that out.

And I kinda thought that I should keep the stuff the way it is. When thinking about it, everything is too "nerdy" for me to care a lot about.

But, I'm interested in the "quality" setting. How do it change it? I'm just interested in doing some testing with it, although I'm sure I won't tell a difference, it's just a way to spend some time.

-q #, 0-9
Quality is a bit misleading, it's only quality of the psycho-acoustics, not quality in total. Lowering the number makes the encoder spend more time on psymodeling, but whether you get anything productive from the extra time is not guaranteed. I *think* for low bitrate presets the qval gets higher (ie lower quality) because the limits on quality are in the quantizers (the mathematical compression), not the psycho-acoustics.

-q 2 is recommended most of the time, you can also use -h (for high) as a shortcut.

Can you please give an example command line that changes the quality setting? Use whatever you want in the command line, I'll change it to my preferences but I don't know the switch (might be wrong terminology) for it.

Thanks

lame -b 128 -q 2

I haven't noticed: is it usual for a file at such a quality setting to have no L/R stereo frames?

Maybe it's from a mono source?

Yeah, it's from a mono source. It's a recording of a song I did using a mono guitar amp, so I recorded the wave as mono to save some space. I should have said that earlier to avoid any confusion.

Thanks for the switch!