With a little luck I will soon have an Empeg on it's way to me. Now my question is, what do you fellows find to be the best bitrate for your empeg purposes? In the past I have always used Lame at 192kbps CBR.

I have also encoded all my mp3s at that bitrate (and CBR). Some people swear by VBR, I don't. Sure the files are a bit smaller but I don't believe they sound any better and the space that is gained with encoding them VBR isn't that much of an issue nowadays, not with HD becoming this big & cheap anyway.
(to be honest : I just don't want to re-rip and encode 5000 songs )

I used 192 because this was the "sweet spot" for me. I don't really hear any difference anymore between 192 or higher bitrates, and it's still acceptable when it comes to the disk space it takes. In some cases 160 is also acceptable, 128 however is NOT.

I've been using the --r3mix flag on lame, which gets VBR and all the other bells and whistles you might want. What I like about VBR is that it stretches when it needs to use more bits, and relaxes otherwise. When I'm ripping old 1930's mono recordings, they come in around 112kbps. When I'm ripping current stereo recordsings, they use bitrates all the way up to 320kbps for some passages, with most of the music recorded between 160 and 192kbps.

If you've previously ripped at 192kbps CBR, should you re-rip the old stuff? No, don't bother. For your future stuff, the only reason I can imagine not to use VBR is that the encoding time is significantly longer. CBR coding is fast. (Of course, if you drop the "-h" flag out of lame, it goes loads faster, but that's the "high quality" option...)

Now my question is, what do you fellows find to be the best bitrate for your empeg purposes? In the past I have always used Lame at 192kbps CBR.

That's going to sound quite good on the car player, you don't have anything to worry about.

There's a whole section in the FAQ devoted to this if you're interested in more details.

With the advent of Lame 3.90 a lot of the guesswork has been incorporated into the --alt-preset settings. I used to be die hard 192 CBR, but decided to switch to VBR for the reasons expressed under this thread. If space is an issue then LAME supports ABR, which is like VBR, but the file averages out to be the equivalent size of a CBR (e.g. ABR 192 will be the same size as CBR 192).

At the end of the day it depends on how much space you have on the unit and how many songs you have. On my 10Gb I have 1400 songs which are encoded using '--alt-preset standard' (which is VBR at about the 220kbps, enough to give it WAV->MP3 compression ratio of 7.3->1). If space wasn't an issue then I would have encoded using either the 'extreme' (@VBR256) setting or even 'insane' (CBR320).

If you were being scientific about it, you should encode a couple of tracks at various levels and listen to it using good quality headphones. See which one sounds perfect to you (e.g. 192kbps) and choose to encode at 1 level up from that (in this example 224kbps). As long as this is below 320kbps, then I would use VBR, then ABR and then CBR.

If space is an issue then LAME supports ABR, which is like VBR, but the file averages out to be the equivalent size of a CBR (e.g. ABR 192 will be the same size as CBR 192).

Question : why would you want VBR (or ABR like you say) files with the same size as CBR files???

I started out using music match 4 @ 160kbps, but soon I was able to pick out the glitches. I upped it to 192Kbps but still I could eventually hear the artifacts.

After some research I learned that not only is it the bitrate that matters, but the encoder itself matters. Some encoders do a better job than other with the same number of bits.

I've since settled on EAC + LAME (started at ver 3.87) and slowly but steadily re-encoded my whole library. After extended listening, I'm really pleased with the sound quality, and would recommend VBR over CBR, as there are just some parts of music (usually the most complex and sonically interesting) that need the extra data encoded.

CBR 192 encoded MP3's will be capped at 192kbps, no more and no less. Most tracks have quiet and busy moments. Quiet moments don't need 192kbps, so with VBR and ABR the kbps will drop to a really low value. That means that this leftoever bandwidth can be used for more complex passages in the song which otherwise 192kbps would not suffice.

ABR will be the same size, whereas VBR can differ wildy. With ABR it is easier to determine space requirements, whereas with VBR the emphasis is on quality. An mp3 encoded using ABR will sound better than an equivalent encoded CBR file. This is only of any use if encoding less than 320kbps. The ultimate quality (warts and all) would be CBR 320kbps.

I've never been too confident in using VBR cuz I use MusicMatch and their software leaves you guessing too much....

So, I did all my music at 160kps.... I thought it was the "sweet spot" for quality and disk space. But with disc space being so cheap now, it is a mute point. So... for months I've been going through re-encoding all my music. Belive me, it isn't fun. So I recommend no less than 192 (or go VBR if you can get good advice).

>Some people swear by VBR, I don't. Sure the files are a bit
?smaller but I don't believe they sound any better and
?the space that is gained with encoding them VBR
?isn't that much of an issue nowadays

That would depend on the encoder. My own VBR files are often larger than their CBR companions (same track). This puzzled me for a while, until I wrote "mp3tool" to look more closely.. a typical 128kbps VBR often comes out at around 142kbps average in real life, at least with the encoder I use (not the best, but good enough).

VBR should outperform CBR in virtually every case, except perhaps for just plain speech, or maybe at really high bitrates where the StrongArm might be more loaded doing the decoding (unlikely).

Cheers

-ml

It's a common misconception that VBR is supposed to produce smaller files. Yes it will on certain types of music, but that's a side effect. The point is to allow the encoder to exceed a predetermined kbps when the need arises, thus ensuring quality is maintained (within the confines of MP3 lossy encoding). If you force it stick to a max. level using CBR you can get distortion. E.g. Ray of Light (Madonna) will highlight this when partway through the track just before a chorus there's a rapid scale spanning a couple of octaves using a high energy electronic sound (even minidisc using coaxial digital link can't cope with that). ABR is a more conservative form of VBR, so the kbps changes within in a smaller band of settings, thus it won't differ in size to a CBR encoded file.

An MP3 encoded using VBR will sound better than an ABR which will also sound better than a CBR mp3.

Yeah, I dig those filter sweeps in Ray of Light. Those are fun.

I've never been too confident in using VBR cuz I use MusicMatch and their software leaves you guessing too much....

I've got to agree with you on that. The interface for VBR recording in MusicMatch doesn't make sense. The 1%-100% slider isn't very intuitive. I think it's like that for a reason...so that the not-so-techno-savvy users can use it. But, I'd much rather have something that allowed me to set high and low kbps points.

My work would kill me, but I'll probably end up using LAME to do my encoding (in VBR). This test helped me decide. Warning...it's very complicated.

I very much appriciate all of everyone's input. After much reading and much listining this afternoon, I have decided to switch over to the --alt-preset standard LAME setting for my encoding purposes.

kojak71: Do you find that you can sometimes tell the difference between a cd and an mp3 at the alt p s setting? I have not been able to using my moderate home system or a pair of professional quality headphones. I am wondering if the difference will be noticible in a high-quality car audio setup?

i always do mine at 320 (maximum) because hard drive is cheap and bad sound isn't worth it

Hmmm, sometimes yes. But the reason I chose 'standard' was probably for the worse reasons. I only have a 10Gb unit, and my car is shite for listening to music at motorway speeds, so I doubt that in the car I would be able to hear the difference between an mp3 encoded at 96kbps, 320kbps or CD (it's really that bad). Until I address both of those issues, then 'standard' will do because it get's it right most of the time. I might then just re-encode all my mp3 to 320kbps ('insane') and be done with it.

You might want to consider the 'extreme' setting, because then you'll be in that sweetspot of 256kbps, which in blind listening 95% of people won't be able to distinguish from CD using high quality audiophile equipment. It doesn't take up much more space either, so an mp3 using 'standard' might be 7mb, at 'extreme' it would be 8mb, whereas at 'insane' it would be 11mb. But before you set off a batch run, check a couple of test tracks as well in your car, after all that's why you bought the eMpeg

Not trying to teach anyone how to suck eggs, I think it's a given that MusicMatch is not the best way of encoding MP3s. The article you've linked to is good, but since then a major release of LAME (3.90) has happened. Lame should also be run as an external encoder with command settings in the executable path (for apps like Audiograbber).

But then you will be able to fit paltry 400 CDs worth of music on the largest (ex-)production empeg, or perhaps 650 with largest disks now (barely) available

Hm, you have just 10GB (60-70 CDs @ 320kbps)... That means that you are one of those people actually capable of deciding what they want to listen to... Amazing! I always want to listen to half of my CDs at the same time, and not being able to decide, almost always have empeg in full shuffle

Does anybody have links to the downloadables that one can use on Windows? I found EAC, but wasn't sure what the newest version of it was. And what LAME program do you guys use to encode?

Right now I'm using LAME 3.91(can download at http://home.pi.be/~mk442837 ), with RazorLame 1.1.5 as a front end ( http://www.dors.de/razorlame ).

To rip, I'm currently using EAC v0.9 prebeta11( http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/eac6.html ).

It doesn't matter what front-end you use, so long as the LAME encoder is used as an external program, so that you can use it's own switches. I use Audiograbber because it so easy to drag my whole music collection (in WAV format) and set off a batchrun of encoding (I'm sure that this can be done with other programs as well).

Is it possible with your setup to rip several CDs (doing CDDB or FreeDB lookup) and then batch-encode them? The part I am interested in is survival of tag info (the rest is clear).

Hello All

After much expermenting on my part, and listening on a variety of systems, I have settled on using 100% VBR. I don't mind the larger files as sound quality was more important for my overall satisfaction. I am currently using v7.0 of Music Match Jukebox and have been pleased with it's performance. My files are typically between 195-205 Kbps and about 6-8 MB in size on average. This means that I've been able to squeeze about 1800 songs onto my 12 GB player. I use my computer to play music through my home stereo and the music sounds as good as CD to my ears (and as good in the car too). I keep a large archive of songs on my HDD so reloading the player with new/different tunes on occasion is no problem....

John

Yep, with Audiograbber you can rip the CDs to WAV (under the MP3 settings) and there is an option to 'Append ID3 info to wav file (for future use)'. I've got all my *.wav files sitting on a hard-drive (so far I have 90Gb worth), and all I have to do is drag these over to a session of Audiograbber and it prompts me (among other things) whether or not I want to create MP3 files. Click that and away it goes (90Gb can take a couple of days). It also has the option to shutdown the computer once the batchrun has completed. The created MP3 will have ID3v2 tags intact.

Download the demo and have a look. I don't know if other rippers have this feature.

a lot of the guesswork has been incorporated into the --alt-preset settings

Could somebody help me in how I can use these settings? I tried three different programs (EAC, RazorLame, and AudioGrabber), and they all want to set their own options for VBR. None of them wanted to let me provide my own command line options. The closest was EAC, which allowed me to specify additional command line options, but still required me to select a VBR bitrate.

Personally I use EAC to rip to WAV. This is quicker, so I can get more CDs done in a single session, then I use a Python script to run lame overnight to do the actual encode. This allows me to use whatever command line options I like.

With audiograbber, click on the MP3 settings button, and make sure you choose the external encoder tab. Tell it where the lame executable sits, and ensure that the settings are set as 'user defined' (it automatically defaults to 128kbps which is not what you want). There should be a box allowing you to specify any settings which should only have %s and %d in it, after this type in your settings, e.g. you want standard (VBR @200kbps) then the box should look like this:
%s %d --alt-preset standard

Somebody correct me if i'm wrong, but in EAC, if you enter --alt preset standard or any such thing in the command line option space I believe that it ignores the choice that you have made for your VBR bitrate?

For in car usage Lame VBR 112k base rate is fine, at least in my Impreza, as the road and wind noise rule out being able to tell the difference. I did have everything on 128k CBR and it just barfed on Pantera tracks, and for a short while I went over the top to 320k CBR but ran out of space - admittedly the bit rate increases massively during some passages and one track comes out similar in size to a 320k CBR version!! The wonders of wide spectrum guitar widdling!
12Gb is just way too small - on 112k VBR I can get half my collection on it. Must upgrade...soon! Glad I've got a copy of Tony's drive upgrade FAQ.

Good approach and good lesson for us all, if it sounds right in your car then it is right. If you will be using it at home as well, then that's what you need to compare your examples of mp3's.