I'm still wondering about that VBR thing everybody here's been talking about. It appears we have either different encoding programs or different Audiocatalyst versions.

If you're referring to that "6%" thing, it's because that's an option found in a completely different piece of software (not Audiocatalyst). I believe it was MusicMatch, although I'm not sure.

That link to the Ars-technica article is good (especially in terms of explaining the nature of compression and describing the compression artifacts well), but the article makes one big mistake: It makes its final conclusions based on only fixed-bitrate compression.

You see, the article praises the Fraunhofer encoder for its ability to reproduce the music well at fixed bitrates, and complains about Xing because it doesn't sound quite as good as the Fraunhofer encoder at the same fixed bitrates.

While I agree with the article's conclusions on that level (and agree that it's necessary to compare apples to apples in such tests for accurate results), it doesn't take into account that the Fraunhofer encoder (as far as I know) currently only offers fixed bitrate encoding, whereas Xing will do VBR.

His complaints about the Xing encoder seemed to only apply at low bitrates. But the space-cost of cranking the bitrate on a VBR file is a lot less than the cost of cranking the bitrate on a fixed-rate file. What we really need is a comparison of the sound at a given file size rather than a given bit rate. For instance, if you encode something at a fixed bitrate with Fraunhofer, and compare it to a Xing VBR file that's the same size, I'd bet that the VBR file will probably sound a tiny bit better. This would be a more accurate "real-world" comparison, since the end-user mainly cares about the size/quality tradeoff.

Tony Fabris
Empeg #144