Ogg Vorbis bitrates
 

What is the "best" bitrate/quality to use with Ogg Vorbis? I played around a bit with the new v. 1.1 encoder yesterday and was again totatally overwhelmed by the low-bitrate quality compared to the NERO AAC and WMA9. I'm still forced to use mp3 becouse of my hardware players.

My speakers are not good enugh (they not crap, though) to go very far with my testing. Tell me: What bitrate is the "best" one to use for music archiving using Ogg Vorbis. I'm asking for a mode with the best possible quality/size tradeoff. Something that is transparent for most people but a reasonable file size.

LAME --alt-preset standard with anything between 150-240 as the avarage bitrate for stereo files is good enough for me when it comes to mp3. I can hear the difference between the buggy Fraunhofer ACM-encoder at 192 kbps and LAME VBR without --alt-presetting and LAME APS so I'm not completely deaf.

framebreaking is fun
 

Generally q6 is regarded as being equivalent to aps so if you want to be safe use that.
Otherwise start at q4 and work your way up.

I'm using oggenc with impulse_trigger_profile with the following command line* (for CDex):

code:
--quality 4,5 --advanced-encode-option impulse_noisetune=-5 --advanced-encode-option impulse_trigger_profile=3 "%1" --output="%2" --artist "%a" --album "%b" --title "%t" --tracknum "%tn" --date "%y" --genre "%g" -c "COMMENT=CDex + Vorbis 1.1 Q4.5 impulse_noisetune=-5 impulse_trigger_profile=3"

and haven't yet been able to hear any artifacts (good soundcard > hifi amp > good headphones > bad ears).

*depending on your locale you have to use quality 4,5 or 4.5

i-thank-you

Nobby, you're not one of those dead-serious people, are you? :D

Use mp3 at 48.000 and will have the best qualitty around.

NOT TRUE. Mp3/Lame is heavily optimized for 44,1 khz, not 48. Actually it's very stupid to rip CD's into 48 khz mp3 as the CD-Audio is 44,1 khz-ed PCM sound.

If you extract any sound from a videoDVD you'll realized that only 48 khz is used, both on compressed (AC3 (Dolby Digital) and DTS or MPEG) and uncompressed (L-PCM). (AC3/DTS are very roughly the same kind of lossy formats as mp3, but they are optimized for DVD use with 48 khz.

But still, it's really recommended that you produce only 44,1 khz mp3, the --alt-presets for LAME (the BEST way to encode mp3) are done solely and only for 44,1 khz. You'll fuck up your sound if you use anything else. And besides, some hardware players won't play 48 khz mp3 becouse of limitations in the DAC-unit.

If your soundcard resamples to 48kHz it may be better to use a software resampler (you can use a sample called udial.wav to test it, bad resamplers like the ones in Creative soundcards cause heavy distortion with that sample).

But even then you should rather resample during playback.