Sound quality is more important to me as well, and VBR should provide better sound
quality for the same filesize. I have also used the Xing encoder and it is well known
that it obtains it's speed by taking shortcuts which affect sound quality.
Each sample in music differs in complexity and so the more complex frames will have a
shortage of bits and higher distortion with CBR, whereas VBR will simply increase the
bitrate to accommodate the required bits.
I don't care if an obsure MP3 player doesn't support VBR. I would think all "current"
players do.
The -V5 setting I gave you will provide a similar filesize to Xing's VBR Normal setting
(lame v3.60). Use lower -V settings to increase filesize and maybe sound quality.
Cheers,
Ross.
Ivo van Heel wrote:
> I have always encoded with CBR. I don't know, something makes me wary of using
> VBR, maybe it's the sound quality I got using VBR with the Xing codec, or maybe
> I'm just crazy. I'm just afraid it will reduce sound quality (which is most
> important to me, more so than file size; still I want the best quality-size
> trade-off) or that VBR MP3's will not play on some obscure MP3 player. Please,
> prove me wrong. :)
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