Best Quality MP3

[Titus]

Just thought I'd post a few quick notes for anyone thinking about digitally archiving their music.

2 parts:

1) Extraction
Exact Audio Copy is a must to make sure you don't get jitters when you copy your CD onto your hard drive

2) Encoding
The most anal way to do this would be to encode to FLAC, which is lossless (you can restore the compressed file to a bit for bit copy of the original), and then transcode to whatever format you want from there (mp3, ogg, mpc, wma, etc). I don't do this, (yet) because I don't have enough hard drive space to make this worthwhile, but in a few years when drives are huge & cheap this will make more sense. If anyone is interested in this, I can provide more information.

Easily the most popular format to encode is mp3. Hundreds of hours have gone into developing and fine tuning LAME (specifically 3.90.3, which is not the "official" build of LAME) to produce the absolute best quality mp3's possible from wav files

I was going to write a guide, but Chris Myden's should work just fine for people:

I know he puts a few odd things in his config files like his website being written to the comments in the tags of all the files, but the quality will be there. If you feel like searching that out and removing it, that is all I remember being weird about his files.

Yes, at the bottom it talks about a file sharing group, but that is completely seperate from creating the quality audio files described in the article. I recommend avoiding this trading network in particular, and not just for the morality issues. Feel free to pm me if you need more information on why to not join this group (seriously).

-Titus

[GemZombie]

www.sloswing.com/dj

Been there

[Titus]

Oh cool, you updated your site. About time.

I was just getting into digital audio when I first read it.

Thanks again for your site, btw. Excellent resource. I'll send my comments on it over e-mail.

-Titus

[JesseMiner]

I was going to write a guide, but Chris Myden's should work just fine for people

In Chris' guide he mentiones the following about mp3 bitrate:

These MP3s we're making, what bit rate are they? What's alt preset standard ?

Alt Preset Standard was developed for the LAME encoder by the audiophiles at Audio-Illumination.org

It was designed to create MP3s that sound exactly like the CD original, even to audio freaks using equipment that cost more than your car.

It uses variable bit-rate, which makes the bit-rate fluctuate based on the complexity of the music. More complex sections of music get higher bit-rates to maintain CD quality. Simpler sections are given lower bitrates, while still maintaining CD quality, to minimize the file size. From experience, I can tell you that most average out to about 192kb/s, but are MUCH higher quality than Constant Bit Rate 192kb/s MP3s.

Alt Preset Standard does not use regular command line 'switches', like --r3mix did. It uses special code built into the LAME encoder.

For more info, check out Audio-Illumination.org, which is full of very smart people, on the bleeding edge of audio compression.

Any thoughts on this? I know Mike T. has recommended the "--alt preset extreme" setting to me.

By the way, there is a great thread about recommended LAME settings on www.hydrogenaudio.org.

Jesse

[CafeSavoy]

i use "--alt preset insane".

[Titus]

For APS vs APX: from this post by Dibrom, who developed the alt-presets:

"As I've said before, and this is really no joke people, --alt-preset extreme really doesn't offer any true benefits in sound quality across the board. It sounds a tiny, little, ever so subtle bit better on some of the samples the --alt-presets still have problems with, but those samples don't sound perfect anyway, and the improvement extreme offers is almost negligible. The only reason I offered this preset is because I knew that no matter how good --alt-preset standard sounded, people would think they needed more (without doing listening tests). So instead of having them use something which is likely to decrease quality, I made a preset which doesn't really offer much of an increase in quality (because it's not really possible to do this without internal changes to lame), but also doesn't decrease quality."

For APS vs API, read this post.

Essentially says there still isn't much improvement, and it takes up a lot more space. In my experience it is often about twice the size depending on the file, and more than 2 1/2 times what is necessary for pre-stereo recordings.

[Titus]

I forgot to mention in my previous posts that most of my audio compression friends who want more quality than LAME APS provides, go Lossless. FLAC seems to be the one that most all of them prefer - http://flac.sourceforge.net/index.html

I figure it will be several years before hard drive space is cheap enough for me to justify using FLAC on my collection, but that would be the next highest level I'd be interested in.

Mihai has also been speaking very highly of Apple's new lossless codec. It doesn't appear to be nearly as efficient as FLAC, but if you are using I-Tunes or an IPOD, that would probably be the one to look into.