I use the popular EAC & Lame combo for ripping/encoding using the "alt preset extreme setting" exclusively for music, so far. I'm about to rip a 6 cd audio book. Is alt preset extreme gonna be overkill for that? If so, what setting do you folks recommend for audio books?

I did the same thing with The Silmarillion. That series is just an actor reading the book with little/no extra music or sound effects.

That being said I can't find any reason why you'd need to encode these at anything higher than 128. Expecially not VBR. Kind of like how people don't mind listening to AM stations so long as it's talk radio.

Cool. What about live concert albums from comedians like Seinfeld or Chris Rock? Any reason to do those anything higher than 128?

I've just encoded the Hobbit from CD, and I ended up doing it as 64 kbit VBR, Mono. This seemed to produce acceptable results, with very small files - I'm happy with the end result, although the CD's are just talking, with few musical/background effects.

Paul.

Seinfeld or Chris Rock sometimes include songs, though.

And if you're really a perfectionist, you could probably hear artifacting in the clapping. I have that on some tracks encoded at 64 kbps that I can hear inconsistencies in the clapping to comedians, so I don't doubt with a trained ear (not me) you might be able to hear it at 128. Not really a big though, as you're listening for the humor, not the musical content.

John

Funny, that's almost exactly what I used when I encoded the Lord of the Rings series. That, however, was in stereo, using LAME ABR to get 64kbit average. I tested a bunch of different rates and 64kbit was the one I thought introduced the least artifacts (yes, there were some) without too much overhead.

Audiobooks on long trips good!

Paul

There is a voice preset, "LAME --preset voice" which appers to be a 56kbps CBR setting, but you can force VBR by adding -v. But I have no idea how good or bad it is.
This is from the "LAME --preset help" help output.

It is also possible to use "LAME --alt-preset <bitrate>".

Using ``lame --preset longhelp'' will give you more information about those modes.

And if you're really a perfectionist, you could probably hear artifacting in the clapping.

I'm with you on this one. Concert performances are the most critical to encode at high bit rates, for precisely this reason. Noisy high frequency sounds with a lot of randomness (applause being the best example of this) are the hardest to encode well and will show the artifacts most strongly. You could have a song where most of the music sounds fine, but the audience sounds like they're applauding from underneath 50 feet of water.

For speech (with a single, centred narrator, and no sound effects etc), I use lame -V 9 -mm --resample 22.05

That's lowest-rate VBR (implies -q 2 - slow, high-quality encoding), merging left+right to mono, and half the normal CD sample rate (implies low-pass filter at about 10kHz).

That gets it down to about 30-40 kb/s and I can't hear any ill effects (in the car, at least).

As your ears are different to mine, I suggest you encode one track at three or four different settings, using what you read in this thread as a base, and compare them to decide what's acceptable to you.

Is alt preset extreme gonna be overkill for that? If so, what setting do you folks recommend for audio books?

That's kind of like asking "How high is up?" The bitrate you use depends entirely on your expectations and requirements for quality.

I can offer some insight, however. I have about 200 hours of audiobooks on my computer from different sources and at greatly varying bitrates.

Probably the best quality is my "Lord of the Rings" ripped and encoded from CD using Audio Catalyst, VBR, probably averaging about 100--105 kbps. I've never detected any deficiency whatsoever with this, and it is probably overkill.

I have several audiobooks downloaded from "audiobooksforfree.com" at 64 kbps. Not concert hall quality, but certainly more than adequate for listening when you consider that at least 95% of your attention is to the content, not the sound quality of the file.

Audiobooksforfree.com keeps cutting the bandwidth on their free downloads. Their 32 kbps files were noticeably poorer than their 64 kbps, but still OK, just lacking in low frequency response, and a bit scratchy on the high end. A bit of equalizer tweaking made them quite listenable.

Then they went down to 16 kbps. With standard equalization it would hurt my ears to listen to it. With major equalization changes (as much as 20 dB down in some bands) it became listenable (I had no difficulty understanding the words) but hardly enjoyable.

When they went to 8 kbps it became intolerable. No amount of equalization could make it listenable. A pronounced whine about 2500Hz, no bass response whatsoever, could hardly tell if it was a man or woman doing the reading, sometimes not sure what language. So they accomplished their goal, and got me to pay for the 64 kbps downloads. At a flat fee of $6 per book, it is still a very good deal, and 64 kbps is quite acceptable to me for an audiobook.

tanstaafl.