Just realized 3.98a12 is out.

Very curious about it I did a very short first test using -V1.
From this alpha 12 looks very promising. It's pretty good on eig compared to what I remember from earlier versions. Most of the problem samples I tried seem to be good or adequate. herding_call still suffers but it's not annoying. lead-voice still has a slight tremolo effect, whereas I didn't hear it on Trumpet: My Prince.

Good work, Robert, Gabriel and whoever contributed.

Will go into a more detailed test within the next days.

Thanx Halb! Looking forward checking out the more detailed test

nvm - I found it here.

http://www.rarewares.org/mp3.html

http://www.rarewares.org/mp3.html

3.98 seems overall more robust on some samples of mine. I am looking possibly into a PC HiFi / portable solution and bitrate should be < 200k. So far -V5 sounds ok , but not I can abx artifacts here and there. With -V3 at least all normal stuff is transparent. I tested some of my samples and robertos.

My hunch is that 170k -V3 encoding would do the job. Higher settings are too large with louder music. Any suggestions welcome.

Robert told me in PM that alpha12 qualitywise is the same thing as alpha11 (differences are concerning the header).

I just looked up my alpha11 test. Obviously my quality demands today are lowered quite a bit.
And it's true: I don't care much any more about encoding errors if they're rather rare and not serious.
I'm starting to hate intensive abxing though I do know it's the only way to objectively learn about differences that are not very obvious.