by rusty » Mon Sep 22, 2003 7:16 pm
2.0.2 Beta 2 has just been posted to the beta forum.
Although we've improved the dialog somewhat, we still have a bit more work to do in this area before beta 3.
The short answer to your question is that 'it depends' on how space constrained you are/how much music you have, how good your ears are (some people can't tell the diff between an MP3 at 128 kbps CBR while others will be able to do so at 192 kbps).
Here are some rules of thumb that I use:
-I generally prefer OGG over MP3 as it gives greater quality at any bandwidth, however, it may not be supported on other devices that you play your files on.
-If I'm using MP3, using the Pre-tuned settings (aka presets) gives the best results as these have been fine tuned for optimal quality.
-Any of the VBR (variable bit rate) settings give better quality than similar ABR (average bit rate) or CBR (constant bit rate) settings. This is because VBR uses more bandwidth if the musical sample requires it. ABR is simply a variant of VBR that does so as well, but is further constrained than VBR in terms of how much the bandwidth used may vary. CBR is even further constrained as its bitrate is constant.
-The main reason for not using VBR is in case you have some MP3 player that doesn't support it--some players are more finicky with VBR/ABR than with CBR.
-Assuming you've decided to use VBR, the best choices are most likely one of the following presets: Medium, Standard, or Extreme -- the choice really depends on the level of quality you desire vs. how much space you have available on your drive and the devices you'll be using to play the tracks (note that the '-fast' versions of each of these presets yield slightly reduced quality, but encoding is faster).
Hope this answers your question.
2.0.2 Beta 2 has just been posted to the beta forum.
Although we've improved the dialog somewhat, we still have a bit more work to do in this area before beta 3.
The short answer to your question is that 'it depends' on how space constrained you are/how much music you have, how good your ears are (some people can't tell the diff between an MP3 at 128 kbps CBR while others will be able to do so at 192 kbps).
Here are some rules of thumb that I use:
-I generally prefer OGG over MP3 as it gives greater quality at any bandwidth, however, it may not be supported on other devices that you play your files on.
-If I'm using MP3, using the Pre-tuned settings (aka presets) gives the best results as these have been fine tuned for optimal quality.
-Any of the VBR (variable bit rate) settings give better quality than similar ABR (average bit rate) or CBR (constant bit rate) settings. This is because VBR uses more bandwidth if the musical sample requires it. ABR is simply a variant of VBR that does so as well, but is further constrained than VBR in terms of how much the bandwidth used may vary. CBR is even further constrained as its bitrate is constant.
-The main reason for not using VBR is in case you have some MP3 player that doesn't support it--some players are more finicky with VBR/ABR than with CBR.
-Assuming you've decided to use VBR, the best choices are most likely one of the following presets: Medium, Standard, or Extreme -- the choice really depends on the level of quality you desire vs. how much space you have available on your drive and the devices you'll be using to play the tracks (note that the '-fast' versions of each of these presets yield slightly reduced quality, but encoding is faster).
Hope this answers your question.