Stereo or Joint Stereo? 44100 or 48000?

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

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by evilboris

LAME is lossy by nature as it is a mp3 encoder.

I wasn't talking about LAME, wasn't I? I was talking about the term joint-stereo in general. That LAME/(every other mp3 codec) is always lossy should be clear to everyone that listens to music on his computer.

Originally Posted by evilboris

The point is that joint stereo is more effective compression and saves bandwith, yielding higher quality audio.

I didn't doubt this. But you should add that efficiency is decreased if the channels don't correlate much (normally they do).

Originally Posted by evilboris

From the lame docs:

I know the LAME codec and that it is using the Middle/Side-type of joint-stereo. But this process doesn't introduce artifacts (and therefore is completly reversible). What degrades quality is the quantization of the resulting bitstreams (different amount of bits are allocated).

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by Iceboy

VBR takes longer to rip

That's nonsense. Ripping has nothing to do with the encoding process.

Originally Posted by Iceboy

and encode

I doubt that, any proof? Today's optimizations on the LAME codec are mostly done in the VBR area, so IF VBR encoding does take more time than CBR encoding its about a few seconds (or even ms).

Originally Posted by Iceboy

and you get VERY SLIGHTLY better sound with 320k. Its quicker for me to rip in that. Thats the main reason I do it, actually.

It only does sound better if the VBR estimation algo is bad and allocates too few bits for the frame. Of course 320kbit/s CBR is the best encoding mode you have, because the peak bitrate of a frame can't exceed 320kbit/s - so that's the final limit.
BUT CBR always allocates the full bits for one frame, even if the audio data can be reconstructed using fewer bits. So VBR gets you the same quality (IF the estimation algorithm is not flawed, what we assume) but consuming fewer space.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Originally Posted by Iceboy

It stands to reason a complex piece of 320k orchestral/electronic music will sound better than a 192k rip, because there is more data to play with!

Funny thing is that orchestral and electronic music does compress best in general. FLAC encodes of orchestra music show this very clearly.

The more 'noisy' music gets the harder it is to compress (because of entropy).

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Originally Posted by Iceboy

Not beint funny but how do you mean? Ive never used FLAC, thats all.

FLAC is lossless compression of wave data (I hope you know that). And FLAC is therefore VBR by concept.
Method is (simplified) like that: Waveform is analyzed and approximated using some mathematical functions. The parameters can easily and efficiently be stored and even compressed further. But this approximation is not perfect, so there is some residual error which is compressed and stored in the bitstream.

This means that the more 'order' music contains ('order' in the sense that the waveform is easily approximated using mathematical functions - for details see the FLAC homepage) the better it is compressed. If you go from 'ordered' music to 'noisy' music compression gets worse. Reason is simple: You can't compress noise - that's because of entropy.

Originally Posted by Iceboy

What do you mean?

By entropy? If you're not familiar with the concept of entropy (information theory) then you should read a wikipedia article or something similar.

Additional Spam:

Originally Posted by ArrowHead

When using VBR, high bitrates are used when they're needed and lower bitrates are used when they're not. So you can tell that a certain piece of music "compresses well" if the average bitrate comes out pretty low.

I just wanted to note that FLAC encodings are a strong indication of how good the music data actually compresses (compression = lossless compression).

I was speaking idiomatically.