[MP3 ENCODER] Preservation a ID3 tags
Wouldn't it be useful if lame was able to automatically copy the ID3 tags from the source file to the destination when reencoding with the --mp3input option? I don't like it that after reencoding all my tags are lost. Marc de Lange -- MP3 ENCODER mailing list ( http://geek.rcc.se/mp3encoder/ )
[MP3 ENCODER] To use VBR or not not use?
I want to convert a CD to mp3 files with a good quality and a reasonable file size. I played around with the VBR setting and found that using the follwing switches (lame 3.60): -h -k -lowpass 999 -b 32 -B 224 -v -V 3 results in mp3 files in stereo with a means bitrate of about 182 kbps. I can imagin that this should give a higher quality then CBR at 192 kbps because difficult parts gets 224 kbps. But reading the file usage I found: *NOTE* No psy-model is perfect, so there can often be distortion which is audible even though the psy-model claims it is not! Thus using a small minimum bitrate can result in some aggressive compression and audible distortion even with -V 0. Thus using -V 0 does not sound better than a fixed 256kbs encoding. For example: suppose in the 1kHz frequency band the psy-model claims 20db of distortion will not be detectable by the human ear, so LAME VBR-0 will compress that frequency band as much as possible and introduce at most 20db of distortion. Using a fixed 256kbit framesize, LAME could end up introducing only 2db of distortion. If the psy-model was correct, they will both sound the same. If the psy-model was wrong, the VBR-0 result can sound worse. I read that as: Quality is unsure in VBR compared to CBR Is it a better choice to encode the CD on CBR 192 kbps? I know listening is a good probe but this takes a lot of time. BTW I 've never seen a histogram in VBR mode, with the windows version, without using the the --nohist option. Marc -- MP3 ENCODER mailing list ( http://geek.rcc.se/mp3encoder/ )
[MP3 ENCODER] Disabling lowpass?
I am interested is VBR encoding so when I discovered LAME I started to play with it. For relative low quality I used -V 7 and didn't specify a minimum bit rate. To increase the quality I changed to -V 5 and added -b 64 (or something comparable). After upgrading from 3.50 to 3.58 I saw that a low pass filter was applied (cutting above 15,xxx Hz and decreasing above 12,xxx Hz) in this case. My first question is: is this automatic filter also in 3.50 (there was no output on the screen that told me about the filter in this version). I discovered that this low pass filter was induced by the bit rate setting and independent from the VBR quality setting. I thought that the point where this filter isn't used is somewhere around 112. When I want to encode a file containing some difficult/dynamic parts and some easy parts using VBR I have the following options: lame -v -b 80 -h file.wav file.mp3 in this case the low pass filter is used so especially the dynamic parts aren't at best lame -v -h file.wav file.mp3 no low pass, but the easy parts may have a to low bit rate lame -v -b 128 -h file.wav file.mp3 no low pass, no low bit rate for easy parts, but file size is bigger then necessary (getting a smaller file is the most important reason for encoding it to mp3, isn't it?) So my second question is how to control (or disable) this filter manually? Marc -- MP3 ENCODER mailing list ( http://geek.rcc.se/mp3encoder/ )
