- This is not about bit rate, this is about quality. Getting a higher bit rate 
does not automatically equal getting a higher quality. In fact, botching the 
psychoacoustics model with a load of settings is a good recipe to get similar 
or higher bit rates but a lower quality.
- For assessing quality, one person's subjective listening tests mean next to 
nothing. It is for this reason that I kept my own perception of sound quality 
out of this discussion (I also have a set of pretty good headphones and trained 
ears, but that's simply not relevant). However, there are ways to objectively 
test quality, by using ABX methodology, long systematic testing, a large sample 
of listeners, and sounds statistical analysis. That 's exactly what the folks 
at hydrogenaudio.org did, and they came up with recommended settings for 
standalone LAME. They also found that it's easy to pull down the quality by 
giving LAME a bunch of extra switches (you'd have to go digging through the 
hydrogenaudio forums for that). For this reason, I will trust anything that 
gives output that is bitwise identical to standalone LAME with the 
hydrogenaudio recommended switches, and I will not trust anything else.  The 
"lamemp3enc" element falls into the former category, the "lame" element into 
the latter. Histograms of bitrates are irrelevant.
- Conicidentally, the same people at hydrogenaudio.org found that "Nowadays 
LAME is considered the best MP3 encoder at mid-high bitrates and features the 
best VBR model among MP3 implementations." Oh, and there's what they think 
about Xing: "The Xing (pronounced "zing") MP3  encoder was one of the fastest 
MP3 encoders. Of course that comes with a price, and quality wasn't on par with 
encoders tuned for quality instead of speed, like FhG Slowenc (Audioactive) and 
LAME."

So here we are, LAME is at the very least one of the best encoders out there, 
and nobody will miss the restricted ones that were thrown out. As FiloSottile 
said, the "lame" interface to liblame is buggy, the "lamemp3enc" interface is 
not. The only thing up for discussion is really how to call  "lamemp3enc" (and 
make sure it's implemented in the Maverick release). Here's my proposal again:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=630779

CD Quality
----------
audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! lamemp3enc name=enc target=0 quality=2 
! xingmux ! id3v2mux

Portable MP3 Player Quality
---------------------------
audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! lamemp3enc name=enc target=0 quality=6 
! xingmux ! id3v2mux

Voice Quality
-------------
audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! lamemp3enc name=enc target=1 bitrate=56 
mono=true ! xingmux ! id3v2mux


** Bug watch added: GNOME Bug Tracker #630779
   https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=630779

-- 
Sound Juicer - MP3 quality doesn't change
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/195483
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