I am on the same hunt as many of you...which encoder...what bitrate....what quality settings. This is where I'm at....and still looking for help:

1 - I read the remix review and some others...all seem to point to Lame having the best sound, followed very closely by the Fraunhaufer... Xing having the advantage in terms of speediness.

2 - Most all encoders use a low pass filter around 15-16 kHz...effectively chopping off the highs. Lame is the one exception that allows you to turn this off using the -k option to get full bandwidth. At this time, however, I'm unsure of the complete effects of this manuever. Don't know if it slows down the encoding or adds artifacts. I've been using it though...and crossing my fingers..

3 - While Xing is reported to be way faster, I also don't like the fact that it lops off the highs. But I'm still on the fence about the issue. Perhaps if I was limiting myself to Nomad usage or something...but not with the Empeg which will be playing in car and home system a plenty. Probably worth taking the extra time to use Lame.

4 - Figuring out which settings to use in Lame is something else. The guys that are working on Lame are constantly changing it. There are warnings all over the docs to use VBR mode at own risk since VBR is currently under heavy development. For a while I subscribed the the Lame developer maillist and listened to them chitter chatter about it all. It was all very confusing and I went away having absolutely no idea what the optimal settings would be in Lame...and feeling even that because they have been changing the algorithms over time, what was once the right settings a while ago, may not now be the case. These are the settings for Lame that I have settled on for now, but nervous still about VBR:

lame in_file out_file -V1 -mj -h -b160 -F -k -p

Those settings effectly use quality 1 of VBR mode (whatever that means) with a minium bitrate of 160, forced to that min, with the 16kHz lowpass filter turned off and joint stereo mode. Files end up being average size of 190kb. 1.5MB per minute. I would like to try some experiments where I lower the minimum bitrate a bit to see if it still sounds as good, but with some space savings, but I have a feeling that the space savings would be minimal. I'm also torn on the JOINT vs. non joint stereo modes. Anyone have any experience comparing these two modes? I read in some review that no appreciable difference could be discerned between V0 and V1 quality levels...so I have been using V1. I have not tested V0 to see how much bigger, how much longer or how much better it sounds... Anyone else?

5 - Using Lame with Audiograbber is how I have been doing it too. There are lots of ways to work. You can have each track be turned into MP3 immediately after it is ripped, leaving no trace of a WAV file behind (handy if you're short on disk space), or you can rip a bunch of WAV files (it keeps ID3 info in the WAV file header) and then you simply drag and drop all the WAV files onto Audiograbber and it encodes them using whatever encoder you want to use, with whatever options you want to use. The ID3 info all comes across just great. However I still use DrTag to clean up the tags, set the track number fields, etc. However I am finding less and less that I need to do that as I use Audiograbber properly.

6 - For those of you that don't know it, VBR gives DJ's a hard time (those using MP3's). Its hard or impossible to match beats. I've noticed also that the Empeg sometimes has trouble fast forwarding through a VBR tune. I can live with that compromise though...for hopefully better sound.

7 - Lame does take a long time. Audiograbber seems to be able to rip my CD's at about 20 seconds per 5 minute song. Usually averages around 12x speed while ripping (Plextor 12/4/32). Lame then takes like 3-5 minutes per song to encode. It pretty much encodes at about 1x speed on my Pentium 500...with nothing else happening on the computer and at the settings I mentioned above.

7 - I would REALLY like to see more feedback from people about which encoder and settings they are using. I'm spending so much time doing all this encoding. I really wanna make sure I get it right....

thanks

-steve
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