HAY GUYS

evilboris · Local time: Jul 15, 2006, 11:01 PM

The LAME authors have already stated that there is no quality hit when using Joint Stereo. In fact, regular Stereo may sound worse then JS because you are encoding both channels seperatly.

Just use LAME 3.97b2 with the commandline "-V 0 --vbrnew". It's the top quality VBR. You won't hear any difference between that and 320kbps cbr.

And you don't need to worry about the sampling rate, just use whatever the original files were.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

evilboris · Local time: Jul 16, 2006, 05:47 PM

Originally Posted by LiquidAcid

http://flac.sourceforge.net/documentation.html
Look under 'INTER-CHANNEL DECORRELATION' -> Joint-Stereo is in general a lossy process. It can be lossless, but only when Middle/Side-Stereo encoding is meaned by Joint-Stereo. In case of the the 'intensify stereo' algorithm phase information is lost during the encoding process. If thats audible is another question, but in general joint-stereo is not lossless.

cya
liquid

LAME is lossy by nature as it is a mp3 encoder. The point is that joint stereo is more effective compression and saves bandwith, yielding higher quality audio. Similarly to how ABR 128kbps will sound better then CBR 128kbps, because you are using more effective compression. It's used in the -V system for a reason.

From the lame docs:

Quote:

joint stereo
In this mode, the encoder will make use of correlation between both channels. The signal will be matrixed into a sum ("mid"), computed by L+R, and difference ("side") signal, computed by L-R, and more bits are allocated to the mid channel.
This will effectively increase the bandwidth if the signal does not have too much stereo separation, thus giving a significant gain in encoding quality. In joint stereo, the encoder can select between Left/Right and Mid/Side representation on a frame basis.

Using mid/side stereo inappropriately can result in audible compression artifacts. To much switching between mid/side and regular stereo can also sound bad. To determine when to switch to mid/side stereo, LAME uses a much more sophisticated algorithm than that described in the ISO documentation, and thus is safe to use in joint stereo mode.

There's nowhere I can't reach.