best mp3 encoder

[bwethera]

I think that the masking on all MP3's is horrible and you will still experience loss of quality, no matter the encoder the whole freakin format started with digital video codec's so its pourpse
was really for video.

[smopo24]

Originally Posted by bwethera

I think that the masking on all MP3's is horrible and you will still experience loss of quality, no matter the encoder the whole freakin format started with digital video codec's so its pourpse
was really for video.

that i did not know......i'm glad it wasn't created for frat-boys who want to do bit-torrents of dave matthews sound-a-like bands.

[Whoopysnorp]

I get pretty good results with LAME VBR (why on earth did they name that codec 'lame', anyway?) and that's what I use to make any rips that I do. However, to be quite honest, I have a lot of 128 kbps mp3s that I think sound pretty good, and I find it pretty hard to hear the difference once you get up into VBR-encoded mp3s.

Okay, how many cred points did I just lose?

[fargone]

If you've got lousy tweeters, don't have well tuned ears, or stuck your head near the snare 10 to many times, welcome to the world of the majority. Most people won't notice.

How many of you could tell immediately when radio stations all went mp3 on us? A whole lot of people didn't.

On a decent system, I can most definatly tell a 128kbps from 24/48, even 16/44.1 If ya can't, listen for the brittle pixelization in the high end. That'll get you just started in what to listen for.

[Nubus]

The thing is, MP3 doesn't eat the sound all that much. If your mix sounds bad after you made an MP3 you probably just need to make a better mix. I could not tell you the difference between an MP3 encoded in one program or another if you stick to the same settings.
Why do some MP3s sound great? How do I do that?

[fargone]

I disagree. I've heard plenty of songs, whose mastered 2 track I've admired, butchered by encoding/decoding.

I've heard songs on the radio (where I can sometimes deal with the compression artifacts,) slaughtered in the name of disc space. Songs that I may happen to like and want to hear, I've turned it off because of the sheer ridiculousness of poor quality.

I'm no hi-fidelity audiophile, but I personally have my limits.

[Nubus]

I'm not talking about ridiculously low bitrate streaming audio here.

Originally Posted by fargone

I've heard songs on the radio slaughtered in the name of disc space.

What does this mean?

[fargone]

Originally Posted by Nubus

What does this mean?

The big trend over the past few years in radio is to convert their entire librarys to mp3, if you haven't noticed. "Save space. Toss it all onto a harddrive." Squashed and pixelized is not the way I like to hear music.

There's nothing like a compressed (analog style and encoded) Led Zepplin pummeled and processed like it was drawn in MS Paint to make you realize that not all mp3s are created equal.

It doesn't take a ridiculously low bitrate to sound like ass, though, either. As I mentioned earlier, I trash mp3s that I get around 128kbps. I trash 160 and 192 if they sound bad.

If your final mix result is supposed to be mp3, then I think you can mix your stuff accordingly. I agree. You should mix for your medium. Dealing with the limited imaging, the skewed tonalality, and the psychoacoustic algorithm tricks that are used in current encoders tend to drive me away from mixing to that medium.

I imagine that it'll be like when CDs first came out. They sounded like ass too, but over time, technology caught up.

[fargone]

Oh, I did find a good LAME encoder, too. It's a little slow, but the results are good and it offers tons of options...

http://www.blacktree.com/apps/iTunes-LAME/ I've begun a re-encoding mission to take out the almost-bad-enough-to-trash files.

[Whoopysnorp]

Radio is hardly a hi-fi medium in the best of cases, though, what with the compressors and limiters they use to squash everything to squeeze a few more dBs out of it and be louder than the next station.