Hey guys..
Could anyone point me (or say here..) on info regarding the difference between the three LAME options - "ABR", "VBR-old" and "VBR-new"? I remember, a long while ago, finding out about the different methods, but for the life of me can't remember where it was, nor find it again..

Thanks!
Me.

In general, VBR is variable bitrate, which means that each mp3 frame may be of a different bitrate in order to optimize sound quality and storage space. A frame that can be compressed more without sacrificing (much) sound quality will be, whereas difficult-to-compress frames may have thier bitrates set quite high.

ABR is average bit-rate. It produces a VBR file that tries to make the average of all the frames' bitrates be equal to something. Unless you specifically need a specifically-sized file, I'd not do this, as it's not as well optimized as generalized VBR.

Creting VBR files, though, will produce a file of an unpredetermined size. It'll use as much space as it feels is necessary to make the recording come out at the quality you specify.

The -old and -new appellations are just there so you can use their old and new algorithms. Everyone suggests that the new algorithms work better, so I don't see why you'd want to use the old ones. My thought is that they didn't want to remove stuff from lame, so they just renamed it when implementing the new algorithm. It has nothing to do with the files being inherently different, though; it's just a different method of getting there. (The output will be different, as though it was compressed using two different utilities, each using VBR, though.)

What Bitt said is correct, but ISTR that there also seems to be some consensus on the audiophile boards that the alt presets and the r3mix presets are ever better that the standard ones. (Basically these settings set the other lame variables to try to get the best sound at good file size.)

I believe that the alt presets are currently "the best", you can find plenty of examples on the web, e.g. here. This information was correct around 3.92, I'm not sure what's happened since then.

John

Interesting..
Do you recommend using the 'alt presets' rather than just making your own command line?

(I don't really care about fiilesize. I more care about quality, and will go overboard to ensure the best quality..)

Thanks!
Me.

Rrr.. Thanks for the info. I had guessed correctly then. Is there an advantage over 'forcing' a minimum bitrate at 96 over 128, etc?

Me.

To kill two birds, the alt-presets supposedly do more than what you can do with command line stuff. They supposedly modify LAME internals otherwise unmodifiable. Most folks seem to suggest using them.

The minimum bitrate is the lowest bitrate that lame will use in a vbr file. If you set it lower, a very easily compressible block will use it. If not, it won't. There shouldn't be a problem setting the minimum lower. But if you hear artifacts, try setting it higher, as it's possible that lame got faked out by a block and used less data than it really needed. This shouldn't happen and would be a bug, but the minimum would hide it.

absolutely

use --alt-preset extreme and you wont have any problems. My empegs full of 'em.

Unless you are trying to eliminate gaps of course

use --alt-preset extreme and you wont have any problems. My empegs full of 'em

Amen.

Much of my collection was encoded when dibrom still had his name on them, so it was --dm-preset extreme. I actually did a serious listening test on my home stereo, and settled on extreme rather than the next one up (insane?) because I couldn't tell the difference. And only in certain pathological cases could I tell extreme from the next one down.

Welp, since most everyone recommended using the --alt-presets, I will, and will probably be happy. Thanks guys!

Me.

one thing the --vbr-new switch does is speed up encoding by as much as 50%. But the quality isn't affected.

later,
ajay

I noticed that.. I encoded my last batch of files with:
--alt-preset extreme -m s --vbr-new

And it did pretty darn good.. However.. What's the difference between:
--preset extreme and
--alt-preset extreme?

Mw.

These days, nothing. They got rid of the old presets and now --alt-preset and --preset are the same thing.

Isn't the --vbr-new included in the --alt-preset modes?

cheers, Thomas

Don't think so. When I used EncSpot to look at the newly created tracks, it distinctly said 'vbr-old'. Once I added the flag, it was back to 'vbr-new'.

Me.

Hi, I use audiograbber with the lame internal encoder set at constant bitrate 320.The quality setting is at stereo, high.Im guessing that this is the best setting for highest quality with space not being an issue.Is that correct?Also does anyone know what the duel stereo setting is for or if that would be better?
Thanks.Sorry to hijack this thread.
EDIT Pay no attention to the attachment it was too large

Also does anyone know what the duel stereo setting is for or if that would be better?

I don't know if dual stereo is the same as Joint Stereo, but here's the way stereo MP3 encoding works (if I understand it correctly, someone correct me if I'm wrong):

Most music shares a lot of information between the left and right stereo tracks. Many instruments are panned center, or only a little bit to one side or the other. Joint Stereo encoding tries to take advantage of this, by devoting bits to specify that sounds are on the left or the right side only when those bits are really needed. This lets you spend more bits on the whole music track, making it sound better overall for a given bit rate. The drawback is that sometimes there is a little bit of stereo separation sacrificed.

Pure stereo MP3 encoding treats the left and right channels as two completely separate audio streams and encodes them independently. This means you only get half the bits for the left channel and half the bits for the right channel. So a "pure stereo" MP3 file at 320kbps will have perfect stereo separation all the time, but each of the channels is only 160kbps worth of quality.

Most everyone encodes in Joint Stereo.

Anyone have any corrections to make to that? Have I got it completely wrong?