Updates: medium bitrate abr/cbr presets
new presets: portable/portable1/portable2/portable3.

I'd like your help on selecting the right portable preset.

win32 binaries at 'Other Stuff' Mirror 1.

Do you sleep?

Actually, it's late afternoon in Britain now.

Who would sleep at such time in Easter?

Does this fix the problems you spoke of in alpha12??

Yes, it should fix the cbr/abr problem

@gabriel: will there be a feature freeze (no updates from takehiro anymore) before fine-tweaking the codec??

testing new presets etc doesn't make sense if there are always updates to the psychoacoustics.

I do not know if there will be more major updates from Takehiro in the 3.94, but I do not think so.

But still, I need opinions on the current presets in order to know in which direction to go.

If LAME can be improved somehow, for a new version - LAME v4- I'd suggest:

- usage of MPC's psymodel: isn't it said to be the most accurate out there?
- no more n00b commandline support please....that should be removed IMO. Only clean
--alt-presets and the classic CBR modes.

What about --preset standard, any improvement? Is better that 3.90.2 or not yet?

I think that there should be a preset with an average bitrate of about 192 (like in older versions). Because a lot of us used preset-standard and now, its average bitrate is about 210. That's too much, I think. And the medium preset has only an average bitrate of 170.
Why do you have changed the bitrate of standard-preset?

Big_Berny

Only one thing about this is clear to me: Obviously the bitrate should be quite a bit lower than standard. (From what I've tested so far the results are 120 ... 130-140 ... 150 kbps).

I have no idea if there are clearly defined goals about
- quality
- speed

My thoughts about these points:

Probably at the targeted bitrates most pieces of music will contain positions where a trained ear can ABX differences. Artifacts that are even noticable without comparing to the original will occur regularly. So before starting to tune the lower bitrate presets there should be a discussion about what kind of artifacts should be avoided as much as possible and what would be tolerable if a decision must be made. For me e.g. pre-echo isn't that bad (talking about portable use - running, listeing while driving) but ringing (e.g. harsh "s"s) and warbeling/flanging ("boiling oil applause") are really annoying to me.

IMO the lower the bitrate the more important gets enccoding speed. If I want to put 10 hours of mp3 music on a CD-RW e.g. transcoded from my lossless/mpc collection on PC I don't want to wait 7 hours for encoding. No matter how good --preset portable will become quality-wise: If it encodes at ~ 1,5x speed (as 3.90.2 aps) here (Duron 750) I will prefer --alt preset e.g.140 (~2,5x speed) or gogo (7-9x speed at vbr settings for similar bitrate).

So please consider at least adding speed-focussed types of the lower bitrate presets (like --alt-preset fast ...).
-------------------------------
So far I encoded 2 songs with the portable presets. I haven't spent much time on it but I found 1 positon with obvious "warbel" and ringing "s" in --preset portable. pp1/2/3 and 3.90.2 --alt-preset 140 didn't have the problem. I can provide a sample if wanted.

Well, the bitrate depends A LOT on what type of music you are encoding. I tested 3.90.2 vs an earlier alpha version of 3.94 (dont remember which), and on my type of music (pop/rock) the bitrate actually decreased with ~5 kbps on avarage over like 15 albums. But on individual albums and tracks the difference could be as much as 20-30 kbps, both higher and lower than 3.90.2.

Let's clarify all this:

Target bitrates are:
extreme: 240
standard: 200
medium: 165
portable: 130
streaming: 55 ???

There should be fast variants for all those, but as fast and regular vbr modes are quite different, I'd like to nearly finish regular vbr before trying fast vbr.
The standard bitrate really seems to be 200 ON AVERAGE.

Things that should not change much:
abr/cbr: should be ok now
vbr from medium to extreme: should only change a little

Things that need some quick input: portable presets. No need for deep test, but indications about which one to select would be very usefull.

Things that need to be done:
very low bitrate abr preset??
fast vbr presets


Current standard preset is better than 3.90.2 on some samples, but there are some important regressions on a few samples. There is need to work on those few samples.

I can not and should not tell you if the current standard is better or worst than the 3.90.2, as that would mean relying only on my ears, and I think that you do not want that.
Instead it is testers that should tell if it is better or no.

OK. I say kick --preset portable. About the other p1/p2/p3 i'm not sure yet.

update: For testing I used
Omara portuondo - Quizas, quizas, quizas 0:24 - 0:30
Result:
Warbling + sharp "s" in
--preset portable
--preset portable2
--preset portable3
I can't tell which one is worst...

--preset portable1 sounds ok
3.90.2 --a-p 140 sounds ok

Just from some quick listening to the portable presets here's how I rate them:

Bruce Dickinson - Jerusalem (Live)

--preset portable: 159 kbps (Heavy flanging, not useable at all - the worst)
--preset portable1: 170kbps (Slight flanging, best of the 4)
--preset portable2: 149kbps (Heavy flanging, only slightly better than "portable" still unuseable)
--preset portable3: 152kbps (Easily better than portable & portable2, comparable quality to portable1)
--preset 130: 127kbps (Flanging though less annoying than portable & portable2)

I've tested all four on about 10 files so far. P1 is definitely the best, but the bit rate averages about 10 kpbs higher than the others. It's superiority is clear on this sample http://homepages.apci.net/~yorkgl52/VHCymbals.flac. This is taken form Van Halen - Atomic Punk. The whole song is full of flanging like this. Just for reference, the four encodes of the whole song were:

portable - 158 kpbs
portable1 - 171 kpbs
portable2 - 154 kpbs
portable3 - 159 kpbs

I'd just like to mention that I firmly believe the goal for --preset standard should be virtual TRANSPARENCY, not a certain bitrate. If this version is improved, I would expect it to be a tad lower than the average for 3.90.2. Basically, it shouldn't be ABXable against --ap-s -z in 3.90.2. Please don't throw bits away on making it higher, or save bits in exchange for a certain target.

IIRC, MP3 cannot be transparent on some samples, due to codec limitations. Otherwise, I'm sure we'd all agree with you. Admittedly, it is apparently very difficult to ABX -aps and -ape from lossless, just not impossible.

Do you always have this kind of "high" bitrate with your samples? (150-170kbps)

The music I've encoded so far (mostly accoustic instruments, some with lots of percussion) gives 120-130kbps, in a few cases 110-120 or 130-140kbps.

yes. finally vbr for my portable.

but 170 kb seems too much. target should be 130 kbit.

Just out of curiosity, does Alpha 13 include tweaks like -X 1,3 (or 3,3), -Z 1, or shortthreshold for abr presets (eg --preset 160). Thanks.

Van Halen was the highest so far. System of a Down - Jet Pilot was the lowest. That had bit rates of 129 with portable, 140 with p1, 123 with p2, and 129 with p3. P1 was the best of this bunch again, followed by p3, p2, and portable. Portable sounded really bad, as shown in this clip http://homepages.apci.net/~yorkgl52/JPTest.flac

The classical piece I tried, Stravinsky's Ritual of Abduction didn't have any noticeable artifacts with any of the portables. The bitrates for this were P - 156, P1 - 155, P2 - 146, P3 - 145.

So far, I'd have to say P1 is the best from what I've heard.

Track tested: BT - Never Gonna Come Back Down

Portable (135kbps) - distinctly warbling highs, distorts very badly in complex areas.
Portable1 (146kbps) - warbling sound bursts much shorter, more localized in time. Loses the "tone" or "color" of sibilants.
Portable2 (123kbps) - more watery than Portable1, but sounds /better/ in some bizarre way, if the watery sound could be removed.
Portable3 (128kbps) - sibilants masked a little; otherwise, much like p1, except that they warble more in different places.

Overall rating: P << P2 < P1,P3

Edit: I think a little less HF content would probably improve the situation. Right now, I'd much rather have a loss of high frequencies than the warbling and distortion being given as output.

Edit2: The standard 128 CBR encode without any command-line options would be grouped in with P1 and P3 in terms of quality to my ears, although I may be getting tired. Why the regression? And does anyone else find this?

Portable1 seems to produce files almost around the same size as the medium preset. That would be unfortunate since portable1 appears to be the best...

Also, the medium preset will hopefully sound better than 3.90.2 aps -Y (which sounds pretty darn good!) since they both end up roughly around 170 kbps.

The portables presets should produce quite a lower bitrate than medium.
Do you have some cases where a "portable candidate" is producing the same kind of bitrate as medium?

I'm going to test the diferent presets with a group of diferent songs, and post the resulting average bitrate, just for having a idea...

It'll be ready in about... ¿2 hours?.

The test is ready...

The tested music is a group of 16 100 seg fragments from the middle of some songs:

Aerosmith - Blind Man
Alanis Morissette - Ironic
Dire Straits - Brothers in Arms
Eric Clapton - Tears In Heaven
Metallica S&M - Nothing Else Matters
Mike Oldfield - Moonlight shadow
Phil Collins - Another Day In Paradise
Queen - Innuendo
Queen - The Show Must Go On
R.E.M - Losing My Religion
Santana - Smooth feat Rob Thomas
St Germain - Deep in it
The Cranberries - Animal Instinct
The Proclaimers - I'm gonna be 500 miles
U2 - Where The Streets Have No Name
Ultravox - Vienna


Results with Lame 3.94 alpha 13 --preset portable
=================================================

Songs Bitrate (in above order):
162.5 148.5 145.2 135.0 148.0 143.4 150.2 153.8
158.3 147.5 151.8 126.2 142.1 120.2 164.3 163.2

Average Bitrate: 146.5 kbps


Results with Lame 3.94 alpha 13 --preset portable1
==================================================

Songs Bitrate (in above order):
181.3 159.8 142.8 140.9 155.8 157.7 155.3 164.1
172.5 160.9 164.3 133.0 157.2 131.0 173.9 167.7

Average Bitrate: 156.7 kbps


Results with Lame 3.94 alpha 13 --preset portable2
==================================================

Songs Bitrate (in above order):
146.3 148.6 139.8 128.5 140.0 142.5 142.7 141.5
145.0 143.1 142.1 132.2 141.7 123.1 151.2 156.0

Average Bitrate: 140.5 kbps


Results with Lame 3.94 alpha 13 --preset portable3
=================================================

Songs Bitrate (in above order):
154.3 154.3 138.6 131.9 142.1 148.8 144.6 146.0
150.7 148.8 148.0 138.1 148.2 129.6 155.7 157.7

Average Bitrate: 145.3 kbps


AND JUST FOR REFERENCE:

Results with Lame 3.94 alpha 13 --preset medium
=================================================

Songs Bitrate (in above order):
191.1 173.9 181.5 165.0 189.2 164.7 180.7 180.2
184.1 169.6 179.3 148.3 161.9 140.0 204.3 203.8

Average Bitrate: 174.3 kbps


Results with Lame 3.94 alpha 13 --preset standard
=================================================

Songs Bitrate (in above order):
214.8 196.4 202.1 177.2 217.3 193.6 197.7 193.9
202.8 193.9 209.9 171.4 195.1 171.3 221.0 215.6

Average Bitrate: 197.3 kbps


For this goup of songs the reference --preset standard bitrate is very close to 200 kbps, however the --preset medium one is a bit over 165 kbps.


So, it seems to me that portable1 has a bitrate too high; and that's the reason it sounds clearly better than the others. I think it should be discarded, because it's too close to --preset medium bitrate. For this goup of songs portable, and portable3 are very close to each other (145 kbps), and portable2 a little lower (140 kbps).

I'm with Canar, maybe a little less HF content can improve the overall quality (less HF and also less "water" sound)... worth to try.

PS: A quality test is on the way... maybe tomorrow...

Gabriel


Only among the tested ones:

Mike Oldfield - Moonlight shadow: medium bitrate is only 7 kbps higher than portable1.
R.E.M - Losing My Religion: medium bitrate is only 8,7 kbps higher than portable1.
The Cranberries - Animal Instinct: medium bitrate is only 4,7 kbps higher than portable1.
The Proclaimers - I'm gonna be 500 miles: medium bitrate is only 9 kbps higher than portable1.

And this are random selected songs, so i'm sure there are even closer examples.

A preset for movie-encodes would be great! So you can make DivX with good sound at lowbitrate!
What do you think of this idea?

Big_Berny

Just pick --preset standard. It's most reliable. Alternately, pick the preset that corresponds to the bitrate you desire. A special preset for it is superfluous when you have the great presets that are available.

[edit]
Rather than creating another post, I was wondering just how much tuning on standard is applicable to other presets (ie. extreme, portable). Can you take the tunings from one, extrapolate them, and get another with a relative degree of accuracy? Or do they each have to be tuned separately?

Audio-Bitrate of about 200kbits is too much for a movie, I would like about 96kbits. The audio for movies need not high frequencies, so there you could save bitrate.

I disagree with you there. I'd rather have my movies sound the way the audio is, rather than chopping HF content out. Anyhow, movie scores aren't typically very musical or complex, so you'd likely end up with obscenely low bitrates. If you're looking for really low bitrates and are focussing on computer playback, I'd recommend Vorbis, which is much more capable at the low end of the scale.

This is all a matter of preference, however, and I can't see there being a great demand for a ~96kbps VBR preset.

I just use preset 128 for DivX encodes

I'm surprised no one has mentioned ABR for the portable preset. I still don't like the idea of VBR for a 140kbps target. In theory, yes, go VBR but I don't think LAME is suited for this task given its suboptimal performance at low bitrates.

May I suggest something like --preset 145 --lowpass 17.5 --nsmsfix 1.75 --shortthreshold 4.25,15 -X 1,3 -Z 1.

It's also nice that this ABR preset is about 75% faster than the portable presets.

I noticed that there has been a change to the joint stereo switching algorithm since the earlier alphas. Now, more often than not, LAME encodes MP3s with less L/R frames given the same --nsmsfix value...sometimes significantly less, like in one case 6% L/R for a12 and earlier and now 0.8% L/R for a13. This is rather strange...even the 1.75 value I list above is tentative. I was comfortable with --nsmsfix 2 for portable but it seems too conservative with a13.

I also noticed that when using ABR, LAME selects a lot more 256kbps and 320kbps frames (for 145kbps ABR target). This is not a problem, it's probably a good thing because with a13 it seems that ABR does actually average closer to what you specify. With earlier versions, --preset 145 tended to average around 140kbps.

yes. no- yes.

there are already abr settings with lame at these bitrates. eg. --alt-preset 128

I think a vbr try at low bitrates is...

at least a try.

just tune it for your pleasures...

the result shall not be for audiophile pleasures, but to outperform all abr settings at similar bitrate.

By introducing an ABR preset in the preset hierarchy, you are compromising the whole coherence of the bitrate table. For exemple, I must confess a bit critical, a quite piano track (stereo, digitally recorded, 3 minutes) :



Let imagine a newbie astonishment : --portable gives him a higher bitrate than --standard, two steps beyond in the quality scale ! Why ? This question will be for sure a future hit in the HA periodically asked question.


More generally, with classical stuff, an ABR setting as -portable preset gives nearly the same bitrate as -medium (I've encoded some discs with 3.93.1 at medium setting, and average bitrate is approx. 150-155 kbps).

Other problem : mono recordings. The extreme preset may be lower in space than ABR 145 encodings.

Maybe ABR setting is the easiest way to obtain a good quality with lame in the 130-150 kbps range. I don't know. But I'm sure that the coherency of the lame VBR project will be broken. Shame... Ahead MP4, MPC and Vorbis are showing a more logical behaviour

For movies, use like 64bit vorbis and mux it with ogm file container (until matroska comes about). Vorbis is well suited for saving bitrate for video.

Perhaps abr is still the best way to have correct quality around 130kbps.
But that does not really matters, you have to understand my goal.

Right now, Lame features a 10 points vbr scale. This one is quite old and inoptimal. I want to replace this scale by a new one (obviously bettter). So I need 10 vbr presets.

This does not means that you should use them if you want a 130 kbps encode. In fact, it's very likely that only presets down to medium will be available at first via --preset.

But, as an example, portable will be used when you select -V6, providing better quality than the current -V6.

About reusing tuning from presets to other presets:

Yes, some concepts (like different masking adjustment for long and short blocks) can be re-used from a preset to the lower preser. But there are still some points not always suitable to be re-used in the lower preset.

An example is the portable preset: while re-using some points of medium preset, there are important factor which might not be suitable for portable, like quantization selection. That is why there are now 4 drafts of portable presets, in order to select which way is the best one.

OK, I'm comfortable with what you are doing. I thought your intent was to make all the quality-oriented presets VBR (rather than bitrate-oriented presets) and figured that wasn't going to be the most optimal once you hit the lower target bitrates. But if you are trying to do the 10 point scale ala Vorbis and Musepack then the portable preset in a13 is an appropriate step.

Out of the four portable preset candidates, I dislike "portable" the most and think that "portable1" may be the best.

These new Portable Presets produce bad and watery sound.
I think that Lame 3.94--alt-preset 128 or Ogg Vorbis GT2 -b 128 sound much clearer.

This is great! Very eager for an 'optimized' VBR that yields bitrates in the 120-150 range!!! Of course I'll have re-encode all of my 3000 CBR 160 files again, but it will be worth it!

1.) Stravinsky, Rite of Spring, Les augures de adolescentes.

portable: 126kbps; watery, with obvious pre-echo and smearing in winds.
portable1: 118kbps; some pre-echo on string attacks.
portable2: 122kbps; flanging, watery sound.
portable3: 117kbps; some pre-echo on string attacks.

abchr ranking results: portable<portable2<portable3, portable1 (close).

2.) The Police, Walking on The Moon (remastered version).

portable: 148kbps; terrible! Hi-hats are very watery and metallic sounding; useless.
portable1: 153kbps; slight flanging in cymbals, but otherwise good.
portable2: 158kbps; heavy flanging, watery sound, similar to portable.
portable3: 161kbps; similar to portable1.

abchr ranking results: portable<portable2<portable3, portable1 (close).

3.) Dave Brubeck, Take Five

portable: 128kbps; watery, lots of flanging in center channel. Yuck!
portable1: 134kbps; some flanging on cymbals, hi-hat not as discernable as in original.
portable2: 143kbps; watery sounding, piano and sax sound rumbly.
portable3: 148kbps; similar to portable1.

abchr ranking results: portable<portable2<portable3, portable1.

Portable and portable2 are useless, IMO. I was not able to ABX portable1 from portable3, so given the choice between the two, I would take portable1, as the bitrate was considerably lower than portable3. Taken as a whole, portable1 sounds the best, but (as of right now) doesn't seem to offer an advantage over something like --preset 140, which seems more stable and dependable than the VBR presets at this bitrate.

Gabriel: Are you planed more tuning for preset standard?

as a summary: for most people the presets portable 1 and 3 produce rather the same quality, whereas portable 3 gives most of the time smaller bitrates (but according to cygnus it doesn't like take 5 - beh).

maybe portable 3 should be our (your) choice. much smaller bitrates than medium and close to the quality of portable 1 (which produces sometimes medium-like bitrates).

very good point.