My original audiobook CDs also serve as lossless backups so I'm using MP3 for listening on a variety of devices (portable, kitchen, car, standalone). Since there's only one person speaking and no music I'm wondering if bitrates of ~192 kbit already achieve transparency or if this is wasting too much space on mono encodes. --preset voice does not seem to work on current LAME/EAC which according to the wiki is mapped to only --abr 56 -mm anyway. So what do you think (apart from me doing some serious ABX testing)? Thx.

192kbps mono(and voice at that) is ridiculous overkill. try somewhere in the 64kbps region and lop off the higher frequencies, they simply don't exist in voice. seriously, take it down to 22050Hz sample rate. of course abx it as individuals vary but 64kbps mono is the equivalent of 128kbps stereo which is pretty much transparent for most people.

i have mine down at 32kbps and it sounds fine to me(well, there's detectable distortions but not enought to bother me, about the same as radio)

I've found --abr 56 -mm to work quite well for audio books, with no artifacts (at least for me anyway). Perhaps you should start here and increase the abr bitrate if you find the sound quality to be insufficient.

It's also my understanding that for a given bitrate, LAME automatically adjusts the lowpass filter (or resamples to a lower bitrate) to optimise quality. Thus for all practical purposes you need not worry about lowpass or resampling parameters, only the desired bitrate.

I agree that 192kbps is "overkill", but there's nothing wrong with that! If you're not running into file size problems there is no good reason to go lower, or to try and find the "optimum" bitrate.

I used --abr 56 -mm with EAC but the files are left in .wav form. No packing takes place. All other settings are as ripping normal music CD into mp3:s (which goes quite OK). How can the files be left as .wav when the filename extension is specifically set as mp3???

The files are left as .wav if the commandline encode (LAME) called by EAC exits with an error (which isn't seen because the commandline stops and vanishes. Did you remember to include the %s and %d parameters to specify the source and destination files to LAME?

e.g. encoder options for lame.exe should be:




You could actually even use %r to pass the selected bitrate from the drop-down list in EAC to LAME, such as:


and/or utilize the "High Quality" and "Low Quality" radio buttons in EAC to include your favourite VBR mode for music as High and your favourite audiobook setting as Low. E.g.

will send command lame.exe --abr 56 -mm source.wav destination.mp3 when Low Quality is selected or it
will send command lame.exe -V 3 source.wav destination.mp3 when High Quality is selected

With the radio-button option, you'll never need to modify your encoder commandline options again for different types of album, or if you do, you'll hopefully only modify the bit between the pair of %l %l or %h %h delimiters and not delete the %s %d, which is the sort of thing I've mistakenly done many times.

A while back, I searched the forums for a good LAME voice setting. I found this:



and have continued to use it for all of my voice recordings.

It reminded me about this thread: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=67041

Of course... So long time since touching the cryptic command line code that forgot what all stuff there stands for. Thanks.