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Topic: What to chose? Re-encode? Nero and mp3Pro? (Read 2956 times) previous topic - next topic
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What to chose? Re-encode? Nero and mp3Pro?

Hi,

I am a newbie regarding audiocompresson, never believed in it so far, recently my CD player broke down (and can not afford a new one at the moment).

I have converted almost all my cd's to MP3Pro (before I reached this forum) with Nero all the settings set to the higest settings possible (96 kbit).
I can now understand that this format is maybe not the best to chose for further encoding or is it really that bad?

As mentioned earlier on, I used to spend a lot of money on my audiosystem therefor i would like to use the best possible format, for the best quality ( and stil have reasonble filesizes ).

WHich format should I chose ( i guess it depends on who I ask!!!), and it is worth it to re-encode all my cd's  again? It the diffenrece between MP3Pro and other formarts really that noticeble?

Will the recommended format work as easy for me as the case is with the Nero / MP3Pro combination? Bundled software?

I am not much fund of command prompts!

Hope someone can advise me

Søren

What to chose? Re-encode? Nero and mp3Pro?

Reply #1 –
mp3PRO format is certainly not about quality. It is about reasonably good audio quality at ~64 kbps. The idea is to cut the sampling rate in half and load a tiny amount of data to fake the audio from 10 to 20 khz. I feel using this format above 64 kbps is nonsense. You gain about the same quality increase as from 128 to 192 kbps (but probably even less.)

As far as best audio quality the concensus at the current time is for 90 to 160 kbps files OGG and for greater than 160 kbps MPC. If you want "true" CD quality lossless is the next, but major, step in filesize. Bitrate tends to be ~900 kbps. About all you can choke out of a file is 35% and lose no data. Everyone and his brother has written formats: SHN, WAVpack, RKAU, RAR multimedia. The most 3 common have a trade off of compression and features. Full cross platform: FLAC; Win/Linux: LPAC; Windows only: APE, but APE offers best compression and usuage of ID3 tags so it very closely resembles MP3.

Your best option if you are looking for virtually CD quality at 96 kbps is OGG. VBR mode set to "-q 2" will give you best results.

Darwyn

What to chose? Re-encode? Nero and mp3Pro?

Reply #2 –
SBR technology is even activated at 6kHz!! So there is no use in using mp3pro for archiving... Use ogg vorbis or mpc instead!