pablolie Wrote: > I'll see you later, CD replacement! Not yet, though, at least not around > my environment. Of course, as I write this, Sting's "Brand New Day" has > been playing in the background without any dropouts, sometimes I hate > technology and the random %$#@ around it. But while I can listen to > 256k knowing I have compromised quality for now, what I culdn't bear is > listening to a FLAC with the thought that is may drop out any second in > the back of my head... and upon looking it up, there's a lot of that in > the forums.
If you're still in the process of ripping and encoding, you might want to try one of the VBR settings instead of a fixed bitrate of 256k. You can actually get better sound with less filespace and bandwidth. I'm using the latest version of Lame, encoding with -V 1 --vbr-new which gives an average bitrate around 210k. Even the highest-quality VBR setting (-V 0 --vbr-new) averages about 230k. To my ears, both of these sound better than a straight 256k, because the bits can be allocated more efficiently: In the sections of music where there's not much going on, you're still using (actually wasting) 256k, when a lower amount of data would give the same results. And in difficult, busy passages, you are *limited* to 256k when the sound might be better served by allocating the full 320k to that section. The --vbr-new routines are also optimized for speed. The old vbr routines were pretty slow in encoding; these are much faster. You may be able to save time, space, and bandwidth by using vbr, while getting better quality of sound. Here's a page on the latest beta of Lame with a discussion of the various setting and how they relate to sound quality: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=28124 -- Pale Blue Ego ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Pale Blue Ego's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=110 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=21173 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
