"Best" bitrate to use? (128-320kbps)

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What is the best MP3 bitrate to use (for DJing)? (128-320kbps)

128kbps/CBR/Joint Stereo (LAME)
1
6%
160kbps/CBR/Stereo (LAME)
0
No votes
192kbps/CBR/Stereo (LAME)
3
17%
256kbps/CBR/Stereo (LAME)
6
33%
320kbps/CBR/Stereo (LAME)
2
11%
VBR HIGH (LAME)
6
33%
Other (please specify)
0
No votes
 
Total votes: 18

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GemZombie
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#16 Post by GemZombie » Wed Apr 21, 2004 12:42 am

Lawrence wrote:
GemZombie wrote: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.
Another question: although it it seems like encoding a high-quality recording loses less sound quality, I have actually found the opposite: that the worse the original recording, the less room there is to play with. Those squeals and howls of bad MP3s seem to come up much more often when encoding vintage stuff as opposed to modern stuff (not limited to jazz and blues--any modern stuff).
Honestly I haven't noticed that, but again I always do mine at the highest rate. *rarely* do I notice any MP3 artifacting.

I suppose there could be such issues, MP3 isn't relaly tuned to a specific type of music or dynamic range really... or at least as far as I know.

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Titus
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#17 Post by Titus » Wed May 05, 2004 2:49 pm

Older tunes often need less bitrate because they are mono recordings, not because of a lack of dynamic range. Dynamic range of analog medium is less than the potential that CDs provide, but many of the popular CDs produced today use very little dynamic range (in an effort to sound louder on the radio), and still end up with high bitrates.

All of my mono recordings, when using LAME APS, come out at an almost steady 128, which is the lower limit for APS. I could probably get even lower using some mono specific settings, but even mostly 128 isn't much space, and I want to ensure I'm using all the settings built into APS.

I agree with Jesse, I don't notice many artifacts in my mp3s, even the older recordings. Usually the screeches I do hear were present in the original CD and have nothing to do with the encoding.

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#18 Post by AlekseyKosygin » Sun Oct 03, 2004 11:42 am

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.

--

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
When you use VBR to make your MP3's...what are your boundaries?

For example right now I'm using 64 kpbs to 320 kpbs as a range...do you even use ranges when you execute your VBR process? More specifically the VBR process I'm using is VBR-MTRH with the LAME encoder with Cd-Ex...which happens to be its VBR default method...so far the file sizes correspond more or less to what you are saying although there are always exceptions since it is variable...actually I think I'm getting about 300 songs per gig but a lot of times the final results of the kpbs of a file far exceed 320 kpbs which is strange since the boundary in the program only goes to 320 kpbs...if you have any suggestions let me know, they will be deeply appreciated!

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#19 Post by GemZombie » Sun Oct 03, 2004 9:11 pm

With the Lame encoder, I just set it to VBR High. I'm not sure what the lowest possible quality is, but I have seen rates go down to 96 quite often.

I've personally never seen any variations in file sizes that go beyond what I'd expect, so I guess I'm no help there.

You might try updating your lame encoder version, it does get updated and improved quite often.

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#20 Post by mark0tz » Thu Oct 21, 2004 12:31 pm

So I don't end up ripping my entire collection and then realising I used the wrong setting and having to do it all over again, how does this EAC LAME command line look:

--add-id3v2 --pad-id3v2 --ta "%a" --tt "%t" --tl "%g" --ty "%y" --tn "%n" %s %d -V0

?

thanks
Mike Marcotte

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#21 Post by julius » Thu Oct 21, 2004 12:38 pm

it looks like a cat walked over your keyboard, is what it looks like.

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Yakov
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#22 Post by Yakov » Wed Oct 27, 2004 7:53 pm

interestingly, VBR maxed out at 320 (easy to set in the new version of EAC, or WinLame) hardly ever ends up at 320. high fi stuff goes to 192 or 224, and my test on the four-disc Charlie Parker proper box (vintage recordings) hardly ever goes about 112 (and yes, i'm SURE i encoded it at VBR, a Wagner recording encoded at the same session flashes all over the spectrum).

everything sounds great to me, but i have shitty speakers & headphones

(moral: use VBR!)

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#23 Post by GemZombie » Thu Oct 28, 2004 12:01 pm

Yakov wrote: (moral: use VBR!)
Preach it brotha!!!

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#24 Post by Yakov » Mon Nov 01, 2004 8:29 pm

I recently found that LAME seems to run a lot faster when you encode on "Mono" rather than "Joint Stereo"... obviously you shouldn't do this on music that's in stereo, but hopefully a substantial chunk of your collection is monoaural... if it isn't... that's a topic for another forum 8)

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#25 Post by GemZombie » Tue Nov 02, 2004 9:04 am

Yakov wrote:I recently found that LAME seems to run a lot faster when you encode on "Mono" rather than "Joint Stereo"... obviously you shouldn't do this on music that's in stereo, but hopefully a substantial chunk of your collection is monoaural... if it isn't... that's a topic for another forum 8)
That's one thing I haven't been so good on... and I probably should be. Since a good chunk of my stuff is mono, I should be encoding in mono to save space (and time). However, on my machine time isn't much of a factor, the average song takes less than 15 seconds to encode.

I used to have software that wouldn't mix different mp3 types and play them all... it had to be all or another, so i got in the habit of using one settingfor everything, and have been lazy ever since.

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#26 Post by mark0tz » Tue Nov 02, 2004 9:44 am

I'm beginning to think for DJing mono is the way to go. Some sound systems are half-assed and missing a Left or a Right... or just one in. Last night I was DJing at a place I don't regularly DJ and you couldn't hear the singer's voice...
Mike Marcotte

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#27 Post by GemZombie » Tue Nov 02, 2004 10:42 am

Like I said, most of my music *is* in mono anyway :) And in a dance venue do you really want stereo anyway? (A good sound system will allow you to have a single mono out anyway).

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#28 Post by Yakov » Thu Nov 04, 2004 1:23 pm

MP3 is smart enough that encoding in Mono doesn't save you any space from encoding in Joint Stereo (I've never encoded in vanilla "Stereo"). it's just a bit faster.

You can probably set output to be in mono... if not at the computer level, surely at the mixer or amplifier level.

No way will I encode my stereo music into mono!

When you have good stereo sound, the difference on stereo music is AMAZING. I was lindybombing on campus and they'd provided a high quality sound system. I was playing Count Basie Orchestra Meets Duke Ellington Orchestra and was dancing in between the orchestras!

yakov.

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#29 Post by GemZombie » Thu Nov 04, 2004 1:41 pm

I use joint stereo.

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#30 Post by oohahh » Fri Nov 05, 2004 5:46 pm

FYI, there is one issue with VBR and Macs:

From http://www.megaseg.com/faq.html#19:
If a VBR MP3 file enters the Playlist's NEXT position (after a segue for example), it may cause the audio to drop out for a second on Macs with slower hard drives... The problem is that QuickTime must perform extra processing of VBR MP3 files when opened, and during this process it may cause the audio to stop until finished. One solution is not use VBR type MP3 files. Another solution is to use QuickTime Player (Pro version) to save VBR MP3s into a self-contained Movie file. Or use iTunes' Advance Menu to convert the files into standard MP3s.
If I understand correctly, that makes it an issue whether you're DJing with MegaSeg or iTunes.

On the other hand, I've only noticed pauses when editing a song's info in iTunes while the song is playing. This is on a Powerbook G4 with the [fairly slow] stock 4200RPM HD. I haven't noticed any VBR drops as described above. Frankly, it's probably not an issue because we don't beat-mix or segue songs. Whether there's a three or six second pause between songs, I doubt anyone would notice.

-Joshua

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