Thus spake Don Melton ([EMAIL PROTECTED]):
> > constant bitrate:
> > Fraunhofer, lame, Xing, (long pause) bladeenc
> Did you do any testing at higher bit rates as well? I'd be curious what
> the results would be at 160 or 192. (My wife, who has hearing a tall
> dog would envy, can pick out Xing samples at even 160 and above but
> sometimes has trouble distinguishing between the Fraunhofer and LAME
> encoders at those rates. I always use her as a test subject. :-)
No, I didn't use higher bitrates.
My rationale is that if you have the space for higher bitrates, you can
also use Layer 2. I found recent Xing encoders not as bad as I expected
from earlier Xing encoders, but if you use Xing, you use VBR, and the
VBR mode in Xing is surprisingly good.
> Also, were the Fraunhofer samples done in high qaulity or "very" high
> quality mode (aka "-qual 9")?
I used the default settings for all encoders in the constant bitrate
test. Actually, there are not many knobs for the Fraunhofer codec c't
gave me (the one in MusicMatch).
I don't like the Fraunhofer codec very much for music. It is excellent
for speech, but it makes music sound flat.
> > VBR:
> > lame+Xing, (pause) Fraunhofer
> Do you think this is because the new Fraunhofer encoder (like the one in
> MMJB) won't do higher quality and VBR at the same time?
Well, I didn't look at the frames that Fraunhofer generated. I think
that that should not be a criterion. It is perceptual audio
compression, so it should only be judged by the perception of the
listener. And the perception was that the applause part did not get
enough bandwidth from Fraunhofer in VBR mode. lame and Xing are much
more aggressive in the bandwidth distribution.
> And were these VBR samples "centered" around 96 kbps as well?
I tuned the quality settings in VBR until the file size was
approximately the same for all encoders. There were many 96 kbps
frames, but that was expected, as the target file size was around 3
megs. The lame setting used was "lame -v -V 6". So a good encoder
would use something like 192 or 256 kbps for the applause part and then
96 kbps for the rest.
Felix
--
A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the
sun is shining and wants it back the minute it begins to rain.
--Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)
--
MP3 ENCODER mailing list ( http://geek.rcc.se/mp3encoder/ )
