I have a RealAudio stream (32 Kbps Stereo Music High - RealAudio 8) which I've recorded with TotalRecorder at 32kHz (since the high-pass as indicated by CoolEdit is 14kHz). The music is light, poppy techno.

My question is this - when I encode with --alt-preset standard -b32, I get an average bitrate of 147 kbps (see EncSpot below)

[img]dbe119c952[/img]

This seems like real overkill - does anyone have suggestions for a lower bitrate I could use?

methinks that it's due to the quantization noise in RA - and if You try and get lower bitrates - You can suffer alot from transcoding artifacts...