Is there any way to copy the same track to the same CD in uncompressed wav, 192kbs, 256kbs and 320kbs formats? This would allow me to easily switch between the different encoding to see if I can tell the difference on my primary music system.

If It can be done, can I use EAC/LAME to do it and how can I do it?

You should turn the various MP3 files back into WAVs (this simulates their playback by a decoder), and then get a friend to burn the test WAVs plus the original WAV to a CD but get him or her to randomise the order (recording it somewhere you can't see). Then do the tests with the friend absent and, only when you've evaluated the various tracks to your satisfaction, go and find out which was which.

Possibly you could find a program to take the rather thankless part of the "friend", but I couldn't immediately find one: WinABX and friends emit their tests out of your PC's sound card, not onto an audio CD.

Peter

Just to be painfully clear, Merc...

What Bitt and Peter are suggesting is a double-blind listening test so that you can tell whether your MP3 encoder is good enough for your desires.

But I have to say that, for your purposes, I wouldn't bother doing that. I'd just take everyone's advice and use EAC/LAME to create very high quality MP3s and be done with it.

What was said earlier about WAV files was correct: You don't want to do your entire collection in WAV, it would burn out your player's disk drives and cause other problems that would make the player hard to operate. WAV should only be used for occasional test tracks and such. For instance, many people use the WAV format for certain test tones and pink noise tracks for system calibration. Otherwise, stick to high bitrate MP3s as suggested earlier.

Thanks again for all your help and suggestions. I may actually end up simply using 256kbs MP3 but as suggested, I need to prove it to myself. As someone who works with clinical trials everyday, I understand and occasionally use SBTs when evaluating components or tweaks.

First though, I need to figure out how to make the test disc???

Well, I ripped two songs and then encoded it into a wav and into a 256kbs MP3. When played back on my PC, I can tell no difference between the two. I'd like to see if I can tell the difference on my real system, but I'm not so sure how to burn a CDR so that the files remain in their current format?

I tried simply burning an audio CDR but all the files look identical with track1, track2 and all the files being shown as 1k or 44b in size regardless.

Did I make a proper copy of these files or did my burn program convert the files all into standard CD resolution?

Could someone tell this rookie how to step by step burn the encoded files from my hard drive to a CDR?

Audio CDs have their data in a specified format that's the same for every track. They don't understand mp3s (or WAVs for that matter). In order to test your mp3 files on an audio CD, they need to be uncompressed. But don't worry. Once you uncompress an mp3, you don't regain the data that was lost during the compression. You're just turning that new "worse" audio into a copy that a normal CD player can understand.

Thank you all very, very much!

After doing some relatively unscientific and quick, blind switched comparisions of Wav, 160, 192, 256, and 320kbs MP3 files, played back on my best disc player, I have concluded:

160 is the only format I don't want to use. I also had a very, very hard time telling 256, 320 and wav apart from each other. Probably, if I am honest, for the material I tested using Steely Dan's AVA and Nora Jones albums, 256 is probably plenty good for my car and also probably indestinguishable from the wav for most serious listening.

So, since I can always just put the actual CD on if I care in my primary system and my car, I'm gonna use 256kbs (with VBR?) for recording my music on the RioCar. This serves both the music server and audiophile wannabe in me nicely.

Thanks again for all your help!!!

VBR is pretty nice as it expends more bits on complex parts of the track while it "saves" bits on the simple (to encode) parts instead of using the same bitrate, however complex or simple the various parts of the track are.

With VBR you can also, if you want, set a minimum bitrate that the encoder will never go below, even if it would still provide acceptable results for that part of the track with an even lower bitrate.

You can also use ABR - Average bit rate - where the encoder juggles things so that the file size, while the encoder still uses variable bitrate, still comes out to the same size as if you had encoded it with a fixed bitrate (it just expends more bits on the complex stuff and less on the simple). Useful if you want more control over the resulting file sizes.

/Michael

Michael,

I didn't test VBR in my listening tests, but I can set LAME to default to 192 w/VBR. As mentioned earlier, 256 w/VBR isn't an option for my setup of EAC/LAME.

Is there a potential sonic advantage for using 192 w/VBR versus straight 256? I'm guessing that the advantage is that the 192vbr option takes up less space, possibly, without a sonic penalty. Is that the idea?

Thanks.

Basically, the idea is that lame can determine what sections of music require a lot of bandwidth to sound good and which require less. This means that if you want your music to come out at 192 or so, it can encode some hard sections at 320, but other easier ones at 64. This means that you potentially get the benefits of encoding at 320, but keep the file size lower. This is VBR.

Then ABR, as described, does sorta the same thing, but tries to make the average come out to be at a specified point, making the file size a known quantity, instead of having the encoder determine how good the sections need to be to fit some arbitrary (and much harder to quantify) notion of quality.

Most folks eschew ABR, as it does little more than CBR. If you're concerned about disk space, I'd go with CBR instead of ABR. VBR, though, is the more common setting. You don't know what size file you'll get out of the encoder. If the entire piece of music is really hard to encode, it might end up averaging to about 300kbps, whereas a simpler piece with the same encoder settings might average to 100kbps. (Note that those numbers are made up, and unlikely in reality, but the idea is valid.)

I'd suggest using lame with its -preset options. They will generate VBR files with hand tweaked settings to make them sound the best for most tracks, rather than you guessing or using plain-jane defaults. I personally use the -preset standard, and the ouput seems to average somewhere around 195kbps.

Note that there are a couple of drawbacks to VBR. One is that lame, which is the most common encoder, had a bug that prevented nogap from working properly, which means few people did work to make VBR files play back seamlessly properly. The 2.0 empeg software doesn't do it properly. (For that matter, I don't remember if it does CBR nogap properly.) The 3.0 was supposed to be better, but I haven't checked it yet. Also, FF and REW in VBR can be tricky, though I've never seen the empeg software screw it up unless the mp3 had incorrect data.

The 100% safe option is CBR. The just-as-good-quality, but saving space option and potentially slightly troublesome is VBR. I don't think I'd ever suggest ABR.

Yep, the idea is to expend a lot of bits - even 320kbps on complex stuff (ie sounds even better - if you can hear the difference - than straight 256kbps), and less when not needed (ie where 192 or 256kbps would be "wasteful").

I typically use --alt-preset standard with LAME with means VBR that typically works out somewhere around 200-210kbps on average, for what I listen to. Probably quite close to what VBR/192kbps would give you.

IIRC the --alt-preset stuff has changed in the latest LAME releases - I haven't had much stuff to encode lately, so haven't looked closely at the latest releases of LAME.

/Michael

As mentioned earlier, 256 w/VBR isn't an option for my setup of EAC/LAME.

Its worth mentioning that all VBR options with lame won't give you the same quality. I'm not sure how to setup EAC, but you probably want to use either "preset standard" which will give you a VBR file averaging a bit over 200 or "preset extreme" which is the next step up. These presets have been tweaked to give the best possible output by combining a variety of lame options and it is worth figuring out how to get lame to use them.

-Mike

EDIT: Hmm, I think there is an echo in here...

Keeping this simple is important to me. That said, how can I select a different LAME default other than the ones listed in EAC? Right now, I have my default set on 256kps.

By using this setting, I can simply select the CD files I want, correct the IDs if necessary, and then click once, and go to bed.

When I wake up, I guess I'll start Emplode and just transfer those files to the RioCar via my network connection.

I don't think I want to go lower than 256kps since I don't consider space a problem right now at that bitrate.

256k is also what I settled on when I did a full re-rip of my collection. I think you'll be happy with that. I still have a few 128s and 160s in my collection because of downloads, stolen CDs, etc. (I've had Steve Morse: Southern Steel stolen twice now and all I've got left are my old 128 rips of it), and I'm happy with the 160's too, but I really wish I could get rid of all my 128s.

Tony,

If you knew me from a few other forums, you'd know that I am a fervent protector of fair use, including personal and private copying of our own legally purchased media. IMO, that includes all broadcast media such as digital TV and radio, which the RIAA and MPAA is trying to restrict via broadcast flags.

Don't get me started on this...

I'm not on a windows machine right now, but in the encoder preferences, there's a way to select an external decoder. Select that option and it'll let you enter a command-line encoder. You should be able to enter something like "c:\path\to\lame.exe --preset standard" (you might have to specify some variable to be replaced, like "%s" or something, but I don't think so). It'll then pop up a DOS window for each encoding. It looks slightly untidy, but it works well.

For planning purposes, I have a very large CD collection (about 3000) which I have converted to mp3 at 256 CBR. I average almost exactly 100mb/CD.

Jim

Are you using the dll version of lame? It allows eac, to control it with the gui switches. Use lame.exe, then you can fill in an option-string, in my case "--preset standard" like most of the eac/lame-users.

It used to be that EAC only supported a few settings with the LAME dll. Has that changed?

No, don't think so. Only a few switches. That's why i recommended the exe, where you can give commandline arguments in one string.

Oh, I'm sorry. I misread your previous post.