GemZombie wrote:altmanjc wrote:I ripped an entire album into all three formats. Here is the space savings for VBR if I had 100 or 500 copies of that particular album. I was bored so I made a small spreadsheet. lol
QTY 256kbps 320kbps VBR (High)
1 110,357KB 137,822KB 103,661KB
100 11,035,700KB 13,782,200KB 10,366,100KB
500 55,178,500KB 68,911,000KB 51,830,500KB
So if I had 500 copies of that album and did it in VBR HIGH I would save about 3.3GB vs. the 256kbps format and about 17GB vs. the 320kbps format. And the quality should still be as good as a 320kbps file because it goes up to that as necessary. Not that I have 500 albums but just trying to get an idea of the space savings :p
I just have two questions.
1. VBR files seem to need to be handled differently in some cases. For example in BMP Studio Pro. It needs to create a temporary file for each of the VBR files or it doesn't seem to play them right. Are there any other things like that you've run into when using VBR files?
2. I noticed that sometimes the VBR file does go up to 320kbps but most of the time it's at 192 or 256. That seems to indicate to me that if I did everything as 256kbps CBR I would occasionally be loosing a little more data. In the studies I read on the website I posted earlier it sounded like people wouldn't notice if it was encoded at 320 vs. 256 and that 256 would be archival quality. I do want archival quality. I don't want to end up ripping everything and then figuring out that it would've been much better to do it one way vs. the other. I want to DJ off the collection so I want it to sound the best possible.
1. I use BPM Studio PRO. You can have it create the temporary file and delete it once it's done by change one little option. To be precises it has to quickly scan the file. Not all players have to do exactly that, but most players do a scan to get a rough estimate on the song length. Some older players don't scan and don't produce accurate estimates. An example is my AIWA car stereo, and some older versions of WMP. Neither of which keep them from playing.
2. I use VBR high specifically because I want to have the highest quality available. Basically VBR uses the bitrate it needs to highest quality sound, but it's a waste of there's a bunch of silence, and your using a bitrate of 320.
With Older tunes, the dynamic range is very limited, thus full bitrate isn't necessary to compress all the sound available. Even though I use VBR High (in other words a max of 320), most of my files probably never even touch the max bitrate. I pretty much error on the side of quality. I could encode many at a max bitrate of 256 or something, but i doubt it'd make much difference on size for vintage music.
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My entire collection was encoded at VBR High, Joint Stereo (Lame Encoder). Over 10,000 songs, around 26gig of data. That translates to about 2.6MB per song... I'd guess an average song length of about 2:45. That's a significant saving, and I'd challege you to be able to tell the difference between a CBR 320 and a VBR 320 in my collection. I've done my own tests, and I can *only* tell the difference between VBR 320 and Raw WAV when I play then side by side... and even then it's not really in quality that's noticable.
One Final example... I keep two copies of one song around for this sort of thing.
SONG: Well, Git It! From Tommy Dorsey - Yes Indeed!
Length: 3:03
CBR 320 (Joint Stereo) Size: 7.01MB
VBR 320 (Joint Stereo) Size: 2.93MB
Sound Quality Difference: None