VBR Settings and Conversio

[Alex2035]

Hiya,

Many thanks for a great product, I was just hoping you could clear up the following points for me.

I was wondering what the difference between the various preset VBR recordings (Present Standard/Fast Standard/Extreme/Fast Extreme) are as they still seem to have the same range of bit rate (128-224)?

Also, in VBR, is there a noticeable difference in quality when the quality bar is turned up to high, or does this just hit encoding performance even more?

I have noticed that WMAs encode much, much, faster than MP3 - why is this? On my system WMAs rip/encode almost as fast as it takes to rip a WAV - But I'm really thinking of getting an iPod so I hate WMA winning me over!

As the maker of the program, I am curious what settings you use to encode your music - to write dBpowerAMP you must know a lot more than most!

Cheers!

Alex.

[MODatic]

I was wondering what the difference between the various preset VBR recordings (Present Standard/Fast Standard/Extreme/Fast Extreme) are as they still seem to have the same range of bit rate (128-224)?

woah, I didn't know about that bug, (must have cropped up recently) maybe I should use MP3 more

The max bitrate should not be set at 224 for those presets, even overiding that setting results in a file that has a max bitrate limit of 224Kbits/s when it should be instead 320Kbits/s. It should not do that, its greatly limiting the quality potential of those presets.

To see a page that explains the differences between the presets, click here.

Also, in VBR, is there a noticeable difference in quality when the quality bar is turned up to high, or does this just hit encoding performance even more?

It affects what level of quality that the encoder will try and keep in the VBR encoding. The higher you crank it, the higher the average bitrate of the VBR file within its set bitrate ranges will be. This slider doesn't affect the Alt Presets that you can select.

I have noticed that WMAs encode much, much, faster than MP3 - why is this? On my system WMAs rip/encode almost as fast as it takes to rip a WAV - But I'm really thinking of getting an iPod so I hate WMA winning me over!

That's because the WMA encoder is faster. If you are comparing to MP3 with the use of the ultra high quality presets known as the Alt Presets, which are much slower than normal Lame encoding speeds, then of course you're going to see a speed difference. Encoding speeds in Lame are also slower if you're using any form of VBR or ABR.

[Alex2035]

Hiya,

Thanks for the quick reply. In the ALT Presets, are the files actually being recorded with the correct settings and is the "bug" just that the bit rate bar stays the same across all of them?

When using the ABR setting, for example, there is a min and a max bit rate on the bar whereas I was under the impression that ABR was for setting a single bit rate you wanted it to "average" to.

Or is what's going on "greatly limiting the quality potential of those presets", and is there a fix due soon?

Also, I bought an iPod yesterday and tried the Musicmatch software. Ripping at 128 I got a 2.35mb file from it in about 30 seconds. Same track took a tad over 40 seconds in dbPowerAmp and came out exactly the same size. Does this seem like a normal speed comparison between Lame and the Fraunhoffer one or do I need to update or tweak my dbPoweramp installation?

Many thanks,

Alex.