Encoding mp3s: min. bitrate advisable for VBR?

What tool are you using to encode your MP3s? I would just totally ignore minimum & maximum bitrate settings. After all, some frames will legitimately need 320Kbps to sound good (limiting the maximum is never a good idea), and the encoder will go as low as 32Kbps where the audio is completely silent. Use the latest recommended LAME (3.97 final) and the setting -V 2 --vbr-new as detailed in my ripping and encoding guide.

There's usually no problem with VBR resulting in lower-bitrate files, assuming you're using a good encoder & setting. The MP3 encoder merely determined those were the bitrates needed to reach the level of quality you specified. I've had -- using -V 2 --vbr-new -- some piano CDs where many of the resulting MP3s' average bitrates dipped slightly below 128Kbps, just because the tonal complexity was that low. Classical recordings can tend to have lowish bitrates as well. Conversely, metal and electronica stereotypically push the bitrates up due to heavy use of distortion and percussion, both of which make the audio more 'noisy' than purely tonal. (Although that's really a simplification.) And there are always exceptions, too, so you shouldn't really worry about the bitrates you end up with in a VBR file.

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I honestly can't see whether Switch uses LAME having looked throughout the webpage, either. Seeing it's a shareware (or at least upgrade-to-PRO-ware) program, I'd kinda doubt it. That's not what you call a front-end either. Instead, it's a term for applications that merely provide a graphical interface for a program that you must already have, like how RazorLAME requires you to have a version of the LAME encoder.

I love Multi Frontend because it simply acts as a "dock" between your different encoders & decoders. How these formats are transcoded is dependent entirely on the specific encoders/decoders and settings you plug into it. I like having that power, rather than relying blindly on a program that just says "convert to MP3" using whatever unspecified methods and settings were coded into it. There have been some horrible encoders in the past, and who's to say lazy developers might not pick something random as long as it encodes to that magic three-letter MP3 format, not giving much thought to quality.

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Originally Posted by Slogra

Your mp3 setting WILL be worse quality than the presets (-V0 to -V9).

I wouldn't go quite that far... After all, for example, an MP3 encoded at 320Kbps will likely sound exactly the same using nearly any encoder. But using LAME's -V # settings is arguably the most efficient way to encode MP3s, delivering consistently high quality using the least amount of bits.

Originally Posted by Slogra

You can't have both perfect quality AND a low average bitrate. You have to find some compromise between quality and bitrate (+ the many other settings). The lame developers already did that for each bitrate range with the presets.

The LAME developers did not chart out a bitrate range for the presets. Rather, they tried to make each preset deliver similar quality from MP3 to MP3, so the encoder tries to determine the audible complexity of the audio at any given point and adjusts the bitrate based on that. (That was a simplified explanation. It's really a bit more complicated, but not even I have a deep understanding of all the intricacies of the encoding process.) The bitrate charts you may have seen are merely an indicator of what these settings will typically deliver, not any technically-specified bitrate range. Deviations are to be expected. For example, a piano album I encoded in -V 2 --vbr-new results in several tracks with average bitrates at or below 128Kbps, the lowest in the album: 112Kbps, the highest in the album: 158Kbps! That's well outside the typical "170...210" range listed on the chart I linked.

If you didn't mean anything to the contrary of what I said, then I at least want to clarify for others. ^^ And I agree with everything else you had to say.

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