Guide to Ripping & Encoding High Quality MP3s

Check this out, folks:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/...howtopic=54085

Everyone using V2 as a standard yet?

- Spike

Most amazing jew boots

Nothing, I just find the sort of relative complexity of MP3 encoding amusing.

I'm also relieved to find a good standard that everyone can easily use, without ridiculous custom switches.

But I guess what I was hinting at was, is everyone using this standard and does everyone understand it I'm guessing not.

Regards,
- Spike

There's nowhere I can't reach.

V1 and V0 is pretty impressive, although even by my standards it sounds like overkill.

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Well, it is a highly mathematical process with so many possible implementations.

Well, I know that, but what I mean is for such a widely used format, it's taken until now to come up with easy to encode high quality MP3's. Most people don't understand VBR, let alone alt preset whatever.

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Hehe, no and no. I mean, you just linked that HA thread... and its only one of many more like it. People in that forum get rather tired of all the "newfangled" command line combinations that newbies come up with and try to claim as THE BEST!

Yeah, I tried to ignore that stuff. Not very useful

So, V2's the recommended standard, that's good to hear.

I'm also glad you've put time into working on this, Moguta

- Spike

Most amazing jew boots

An update:

The latest version of LAME is LAME 3.98b3, and a very easy to use (not command line) interface is LAMEDrop, which can be found here (at the newly designed Rarewares.org page):

http://www.rarewares.org/mp3-lamedrop.php

If you're anal and *must* use a "100% stable" program, there's a 3.97 version as well. But people wouldn't release public beta's and keep updating them if they were worse (hint: 3.98b3 = best MP3 encoder out there).

So all you people using old MP3 encoders (before 3.97), grab LAMEDrop today, it's as easy as you can imagine!

- Spike

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

Moguta:

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Then, using your logic, because there's an update out there with a higher version number, by that fact alone it must be better than all versions that came before it? Have you ever heard of "version regression"? For example, LAME 3.90 had been recommended as the preferred version over LAME 3.93 because of a regression in quality. And numerous programs have had flaws introduced, or re-introduced, in successive versions. It's pretty much an inevitable part of developing complex, and even sometimes simple, programs.

And when we're talking about perceptive audio encoders, something so difficult to objectively evaluate, where the "better"-ness of a program is based on how it sounds to the human ear, something not measurable by a computer nor even easily objectified by humans themselves, it needs thorough testing to ensure that the changes introduced have indeed improved the overall quality.

I take your point man. I'm going to be using b4 because it has advantages over 3.97, and I use high bitrates (apparently there's no issues with b3/4 at high bitrates).

And Moguta- maybe you should consider recommending LAMEDrop, not command line utilities. Then noone is using switches, everyone's using a simple to follow VBR method and it's easy to explain to newbies.

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Thank you for the news of the new 3rd beta of 3.98, but as of now, 3.97 stable remains the recommended version of LAME both at HydrogenAudio and in this guide.
Also, thanks for letting us know about the RareWares site redesign. It seems I will need to update the links in my first post.

Don't forget, Wiki's at HA are quite often out of date People have lives.
For example, the recommended Vorbis encoder is an inferior encoder to the best (stable I might add) one out there (it's not even on RareWares!).

No problem man, we're ultimately in agreement I think. <offers hand to shake>

- Spike

I was speaking idiomatically.

Yeah, I'm going to get a new EAC pretty soon
Gotta love that proggie.

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I'm not sure "no issues" is quite accurate. All lossy codecs tend to have audio issues, and I did see some early comparisons in a HA thread where it seemed that 3.98 improved the handling of some problem samples and receded in others. Although, it's probably true that there are no major, glaring issues.

By "no issues" I meant no problems compared to 'stable' 3.97, not that it's lossless or anything :P


The early comparisons relate to 3.98a, if I'm not mistaken, or older 3.98b versions.

At high VBR bitrates (which we should use as the norm), 3.98b4 is a better encoder. But it's not really worth changing the recommended version until the next stable one comes out, I agree.

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That might be a good idea, at least for those who want to only encode from WAV. I've just never liked the *drop interface (no menu or buttons?), and some may find transcoding useful. But I'll consider.

Why do you need buttons?
And, all the menu's can be accessed by right-clicking the program once opened.


I think it's much easier for the average user (I use it ), plus, it's easier to get good quality music out of it- no silly custom switches or nonsense like that, you select a bitrate (e.g. 220) and VBR and away you go (as well as tagging options where appropriate, etc).

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o.O I'm not sure what you mean by that. I thought AoTuV beta5 was the latest Vorbis, unless you're referring to all the chipset-optimized compiles.

Hehe, pepoluan from HA upgraded the Wiki after I wrote that post (not because of me, there was a debate on HA subsequently and coincidentally). b5 is now recommended. At the time of posting they were recommending 4.51.


Thanks for the shake!

- Spike

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

This is nuts- GFF should simply recommend people download the latest version of LAMEDrop, pick a quality setting, and go from there- dealing with all these custom switches seems (to me at least) more likely than not to result in people wrongly encoding, or encoding worse files than they could, simply because all the options will be meaningless to them.

Why not just use an easy drag and drop (not commandline) based encoder? And why not recommend that for newbs?

I run a game music website and understand compression reasonably well and would still NEVER recommend a command-line based encoder, no matter the person's technical undeerstanding.

- Spike

FELIPE NO

Good post- I didn't know foobar could use LAME to encode. Got a screenie of it?

I agree with you wholeheartedly. I figured LameDrop was a very simple put together program which just ran default scripts and all you could do pretty much was change the quality- which is all you want "newbs" to be able to do.

I'm also confused about the Standard v Fast thing, I might post on HA about it.


I also agree with LA's comments about command-line encoders (abbreviated to CLE for ease)- I still use CLE's for many things, mainly DVD-Audio decoding (I do a lot of this) and weird format decoding (e.g. MPC).

But we're not talking about us who are PC savvy, we're talking about Joe Audio who doesn't understand what a CLE is, let alone what -v means and isn't likely to post a question here to ask, well, anything.

And I find CLE's confusing and I understand DOS pretty well, and am better-than-OK with PC's. I doubt most newbs would bother, either asking for help, or bothering with CLE's full-stop.

- Spike

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

I'm fine with DOS commands- obviously, I played plenty of Sierra games and had to learn DOS.

What I don't understand is particular command-line program code, individual to each program (as opposed to cd and dir and so forth). There's plenty of command-line DVD-Audio rippers whose command-line programs are near-impossible to use because of all the commands and switches you have to configure.


And I don't think I said using command-line programs is going to result in worse quality because of the program- it's because of users being bombarded with terms they don't know, that the worse quality results. I personally find MP3 switch terminology confusing and I have a good understanding of encoding and am an audio enthusiast. I just don't feel the need to know it, when I can use a GUI which does the same thing.

I'm pretty good with Google, too.

BTW, I didn't even realise English was your second language- you speak near-perfectly.

- Spike

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Hey man,

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Great :-)
Another user who spend countless hours on editing config.sys and autoexec.bat to squeeze out another 2KB to run a particular game! *g*

In case you didn't know, I run a Sierra game music website- Sierra Music Central

Yeah, I spent way too much time editing those guys, not just for memory, but for Sound Blaster settings- damn SETBLASTER variable.

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Manual pages are almost always included with a software package explaining what which option and flag does.
However one should not forget the topic "sane defaults", that's what you mention above. The author of the application should set some standard options which work for the majority of the people, sometimes that's possible but sometimes not.

MP3 has no sane defaults. People still think CBR is the way to go, or that any VBR settings are fine as long as it's VBR. You shouldn't need to be choosing complex options, you should have only CBR or VBR, and if one, then which quality. That's why I like these drag and drop encoders, that's all you can do.

It's definitely possible with MP3. LameDrop isn't perfect but it's a lot better than recommending command-line to everyone, IMHO.

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The best thing with these apps is to create a wrapper script supplying "your" sane defaults to the app (plus the parameters from outside of the script). I have 7zip installed on my gentoo box and 7zip doesn't have GUI yet, so I always use the commandline to compress/decompress. Because the standard parameters don't fit my needs I have written two small scripts, one for normal compression and one for password encryted compression. Like the FLAC-MP3-transcoding script this one is integrated into my context menu.

Do you mean a batch file (or equiv. in Linux), or programming something?

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Even better is getting in contact with the author of the app and discuss changes with him. Especially open-source projects are very interested what the user thinks about their work. And they are even more approachable when they notice that you've put a lot of effort into your ideas. The ne plus ultra situation is someone supplying sourcecode patches implementing his ideas to the project (I'm currently doing this for the pcsx-df PSX emulator project, but it's only a source cleanup in a plugin).

that's fine, but I'm of the opinion that a program should be able to be used. If there's no manual or a poorly written one, then that's the maker's/dev's fault(s) and will put people off.

But we're digressing- we're not talking about users like us, we're talking about the mass public, who don't know what CBR or VBR is- do you think they're asking LAME dev's what -v means, or much else? They don't even post here much about that stuff.

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Ultimately it boils down to CBR / VBR encoding mode and which quality I want. I would already appreciate it if people would stop using CBR mode if they are intending to playback the audio on a recent system or portable and instead use the superior VBR modes.
There are still a lot of other options, concerning input audio format, ID3 tags, replaygain, joint stereo options, filter options, psychoacoustic model tuning, etc. - but LAME does pretty good with sane defaults and when doing your regular encodings from WAVE files with header you don't have to change anything there.

Well, exactly- that's why these GUI's have VBR at the top and CBR is always listed second.

LAMEDrop supports tagging and decoding, so it's a pretty sweet deal. I don't think many people are concerned with tuning or filtering (if you are, go become a LAME dev, you sound more than qualified!).

The point being, we're talking about acceptable gamerips. Really, 192 CBR would be acceptable to most, but when we're talking about recommending an encoder, we should be ditching the command-line confusion and saying "Hey, there's this great little program called LameDropXPd. Easy to configure to get great quality MP3 files. Blah blah blah.." and so forth.


And your English is extremely good. Most Europeans speak better English than most native speakers, to be honest! (Assuming you're European, but it seems the most likely.)

- Spike

How ya doing, buddy?