Right now I am using VBR-Min 256 max 320. VBR quality set to 9. On the Expert tab, I have checked Disable all filtering. Anything else I can do to make ’size is no concern’ highest quality mp3’s?
Theoretically, the best you can possibly achieve with MP3 is with –alt-preset insane in Lame 3.90.2
What I use that sounds the best. In VBR anyway.
On Tab General ;
Bitrate 32 Kbit
Mode Stereo
Screen Tab Advanced;
Optimization Quality
Include CRC checksums
Screen Tab VBR;
Check the VBR button
Current Bitrate 320 Kbit
Quality 0 (best)
Strictly enforce Minimum Bitrate Checked
Disable writing of the VBR tag checked
Screen Tab Expert;
Allow block types to differ between channels checked
Disable all filtering checked
ATH control DEFAULT
Qlevel 0 (zero) highest quality
Audio Processing tab
No changes
That’s horrible. You’d be much beter off using –alt-preset standard, or if you’re paranoid, use –alt-preset insane.
The problems with your settings:
- 32kbps was decided a while ago to be a bad idea for a minimum bitrate, because there would be occasional incidences where Lame would find a passage that it thinks is very easy to encode (but isn’t), and thus would use way too low a bitrate and ruin the sound for that passage. It was thus decided that 128kbps would be the bes minimum bitrate to use. If I were you I might as well try 94 or even 64 for testing, but certainly not 32.
- Stereo is inefficient like you wouldn’t believe. Joint stereo is best at any bitrate (well, any bitrate that you wouldn’t need to encode in mono to sound decent at).
- CRC checksums are only useful if you’re going to be streaming the MP3 on an internet radio station; otherwise they’re completely useless AND waste bits that should be used by the audio stream, thus making it possibly sound worse.
- You should not disable writing the VBR tag unless for some very odd reason it causes trouble in an MP3 player you use.
- Disabling all filtering is a VERY bad idea. That means all frequencies up to 22.05 kHz are encoded. This is silly because modern CD’s are mastered so that everything above 20kHz is cut off. –alt-preset standard normalizes at around 18kHz and sound really good.
- Quality level 0 and 1 ares broken and do not provide consistently good quality. And in fact in some situations they sound downright bad. It’s best to go with quality level 2. Quality levels 0 and 1 are being redone in Lame 3.94, however this Lame encoder is still in the alpha stages so you should only use it for *testing purposes*.
If I enable filtering, I lose a lot of high end. even the equalizer does not bring it back to the way the CD sounds originally.
At 128kbs. the cymbals sound ‘mushy’ and that is why i tried VBR.
when the cymbals hit, the bitrate jumps slightly to take it. they sound crisp and clean to me with no ‘mush’ at all.
I’m not saying you’re making them way too big. I’m saying that you’re hurting the quality all over the place.
About the filtering… ALL music recorded in studios these days has a lowpass of 20kHz applied by the engineer (because of a flaw in the CD-audio format causes distortion above 20kHz).
The Alt Presets have been tuned to perfection.
If I were you I’d use –alt-preset standard for the best VBR quality/bitrate tradeoff possible, or use –alt-preset insane for the absolute best quality possible.
I think that (after reading r3mix.net) the –r3mix setting in lame.exe is the way to obtain excellent (indistinguishable from CD) quality. This setting uses VBR, lowpass filter at 19 KHz, Joint-Stereo (more quality in less space than stereo mode) and the ATH setting. This setting is included in the last release of RazorLame.
R3Mix is VERY outdated. The site hasn’t been maintained since something like early 2001. HydrogenAudio.org is the best source of information, and the Alt Presets are better switches than R3Mix.
Try using –preset extreme
Best quality VBR has to offer IMO
Actually, Extreme is pretty useless. Its advantages over Standard are mostly theoretical. Most samples that cause trouble for Standard also casue trouble for Extreme.
re: Are you people deaf? Am I the only one who can hear the difference between joint stereo and true stereo?
I experienced the same! Especially the “sourround” sound or “hall” effect sounds not quite the same eg. (“The Music sounds narrow instead of wide as on the orig. CD”) -however you need headphones or speakers which are capaple of providing clear sound on higher tones, otherwise as mentioned before you won`t her any difference-
I used RazorLame with Lame 3.9x Codec @192kBits -b 192 -m s -h
(I am still trying to find “my”/the best settings for 192kBits MP3 because of some Hardware players I own…)
I also compared the Lame codec with the settings above with the latest(I believe so) Fraunhofer Codec using the same settings. As encoding appl. Virtuosa Gold was used – however I don’t like it’s design…
For testing purpose I used the same song over and over again: (Blümchen – Herz an Herz) -not a favorite but it was the first song I noticed some difference between Lame and FH. (If anyone want’s a sample just tell me)
My results I gained from my testings where:
1. I am still an idiot figuring out good settings for LAME -(even worse on XViD)
2. The filesize between js and s is practically 0 as by a 5MB file it makes about less then 10Kilobytes
3. Depending on the songs I hear a difference between js and s. It’s terrible if you use some old codecs -in my opinion js was not worth anything at it’s beginning however yet it claims to be more sophisticated -and it is!- however I still notice some difference!
4. Fraunhofer seems to sound more crisp and “wide” but this could be because of point 1.
I am very thankful for any recomendations. My Goal is to archive my CD’s in MP3 only one rule:
Not above 192KBits/sec. The reason for not using vbr was because I am still not sure about the right settings to use and for codec comparison it seemed the easiest to use cbr…
About MP3 and EQ’s… MP3 encoders “mask” (basically, throw away) noise that they think you can’t hear. When you apply DSP or EQ, you’re pushing noise that you don’t normally hear into the audible range, and since this noise has been masked in MP3, the result is garbage rather than the noise that should be there.
I have 2 main presets I use for encoding because resulting file size is not a massive concern (1TB of external HDDs )…
-b 320 -m s -q 2 For high quality 320k CBR
-b 320 -m s -V 0 –vbr-new For high quality VBR
And both seem to sound fine to me.
But there are 2 LAME options that I’m not sure what effect they have (if any) on the quality of the output…
1) The optimization setting on the advanced tab.
At the moment I have it set to None, but what effect would it have on the encoding if I changed it to high quality.
According to…
http://lame.cvs.sourceforge.net/*checkout*/lame/lame/USAGE
Setting Optimization to Quality (-h), equals a -q value or -q2
2) Expert tab, q value.
I experimented changing this to 0 once and it took ages to rip, so I just leave it on default.
Hold it right there. -ms is inferior to the default (-js). And setting the minimum bitrate to 320kbps (which is the maximum bitrate possible with standard MP3) will just give you 320kbps CBR.
Using the “speed” setting is the same thing as using the -f switch, which is the same thing as setting the -q setting around 6. Using the “quality” setting is the same thing as using the -h switch, which is the same thing as setting the -q to around 2 or 3.
I recommend you use the latest stable version of LAME (presently 3.97), enable RazorLAME’s “only use custom options”, and use LAME’s default settings. So the default settings that you should be using instead of your own are -b320 for 320kbps CBR and -V0 for VBR.
I did not realise stereo was lower quality than joint stereo.
I thought the difference between the 2 was the final file size – joint stereo in theory giving a slightly smaller file size.
So my settings should be…
-b320 -for 320k CBR
-V0 -for the highest possible quality VBR
So the following are all defaults in LAME then and don’t need to be specified manually…
-q 2
–vbr-new (when choosing a VBR preset)
-m j
The theory is that it (stereo) will give you better quality. With VBR, the reality is that it gives you the same quality while not needing such a large bitrate.
-q2? Yes and no. In older versions of LAME, the default is -q2. In 3.97, the default is -q3… but these are actually the same thing. The reason is because at some point in development they made a new quality setting that was somewhere in between -q1 and -q2 so they called it -q2 and bumped the rest of the list down.
–vbr-new? I’m not sure. It may still not be the default. But fortunately this does not noticeable affect the sound quality. It will only make the encoding speed faster.
-mj? Definitely yes.
I’ve heard of people saying they hear ‘artefacts’ as a result of joint stereo and the solution is to add –nssafejoint to the options, which apparently makes LAME a bit more careful when.
So my VBR settings now read…
-V 0 –vbr-new -B320 -h -m j –nssafejoint
According to the LAME usage guide…
http://lame.cvs.sourceforge.net/*checkout*/lame/lame/USAGE
The –vbr-new algorithm is not the default. It defaults to –vbr-old
Also I’ve left out -q 2 since it is used by default.
Do I need to specify -B320 if I’m using a VBR preset such as -V0?
Since -B is the max bitrate, I didn’t think it would harm quality by leaving it in.
That was a long time ago. –nssafejoint is now the same thing as setting –nsmsfix to a certain value, but the presets already use the appropriate values.
The -B320, -h and -mj are not necessary as they are already implied. The –nssafejoint will be detrimental to quality as an appropriate –nsmsfix value is already set by the preset, and using –nssafejoint will override it.
So that leaves you with -V0 –vbr-new.
320 is the default for max bitrate
According to Gabriel (Lame developer), “-q3 or -q0 are producing the SAME file with vbr-new.”
I always omit ‘-q’ with my favorite ‘-V5 –vbr-new’.
how I get RazorLame to give me this:
-V 0 –vbr-new –add-id3v2 –pad-id3v2 –ta “%a” –tt “%t” –tg “%m” –tl “%g” –ty “%y” –tn “%n” %s %d
just go to the expert tab of the LAME settings dialog, fill in your settings and check “use custom options only”!

riposo un po' gli occhi…

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