Jim Murray wrote:
When the VBR option is selected in CDex it gives you a choice for the
min and max bitrates. When I tried 40K and 320K respectively the file
size was similar to a track encoded at 160K. Can't hear much
difference in quality.


Are you saying you can't hear much difference in quality between 40kbps MP3
and 320kbps MP3? What equipment are you playing the files back on? If you're
playing the tracks through a crappy sound card and crappy PC speakers then
that is about the worst playback system you could imagine...

Burn a CD with tracks that are encoded at different bit rates and then play
the tracks back on a hi-fi system and if you can't hear much difference in
quality between 40kbps and 320kbps MP3 then you should get your hearing
checked out, seriously.


What would the advantage be(if any) of doing it this way, or should
I be selecting different min and maxes?


VBR (variable vit rate) allows smaller file sizes for a given level of audio
quality compared to CBR (constant bit rate) or ABR (average bit rate). It
works by assessing what bit rate to use on a frame-by-frame (an MP3 frame
lasts a few milliseconds) so that easy to encode frames can be encoded with
a lower bit rate, and more difficult to encode frames can be encoded with a
higher bit rate, so the bit rate is optimised for a given level of audio
quality.

I use Razor Lame to encode MP3:

http://www.dors.de/razorlame/index.php

because it has a set of VBR, CBR and ABR presets that set the encoder up
with parameters that were selected by knowledgable people in the internet
audio coding community. To use the presets you just click the Lame icon
then:

Load Options = Presets = VBR = then select one of the presets files in
that folder and click Open.

If you can't tell the difference between 40kbps and 320kbps then the VBR
Standard.rlo preset file would be the best choice for you. I use the VBR
Extreme.rlo preset, which is overkill, but memory and CD-Rs are very cheap
and I just prefer to have a very high chance of the encoding having high
audio quality while still taking advantage of the better compression
performance that VBR allows.


--
Steve - http://www.digitalradiotech.co.uk/ - Digital Radio News & Info

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