CBR fixes the bitrate, if a part of the music is more complex, the quality goes down for that portion. However, the file size is completely predictable. CBR is great if you have bandwidth constraints, but gives the worst quality.
VBR unfixes the bitrate, but fixes a "quality level". The audio is analysed and the appropriate bitrate used for each frame to keep the quality at the required level. This will typically cause the bitrate to go up and down dramatically through a song, and leads to the filesize (and therefore the overall bitrate) being basically unpredictable. VBR gives the best quality (or more accurately, gives you the quality you ask for) but at the expense of consistency - a file may end up being much larger that you hoped. ABR is a middleground. You give it a bitrate, much like CBR, but it is free to vary that over the length of the file provided the overall average ends up being what you asked for. Thus an ABR file will be the same size as the CBR file (for the same bitrate) but should be better quality as the encoder could allocate more bits for the complex parts and less for the rest. -- radish ------------------------------------------------------------------------ radish's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=77 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=58868 _______________________________________________ ripping mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/ripping
