Feasible Best: Ripper, Rip Settings, Encoder, Encoder settings as of t
Reply #4 – 2007-07-30 08:49:54
Ripping: dbpowerAmp R12 for me too: fast and secure - AccurateRip is great as is secure mode. But I had one or two CDs I could not read using dbpowerAmp which were no problem to EAC. So I keep EAC as well but usually don't need it.Lame encoding: I'd use 3.98b4 which has fixed bugs that were hidden in previous versions including 3.97 for several years. 3.97 suffers from serious and not extremely rare tonal distortions like in Birds. These are overcome with 3.98. I started worrying about these things when listening to the seriously distorted trumpet sample with 3.97 (b1 then). trumpet was improved in later 3.97 versions and is overcome totally with 3.98. There is still a tremolo issue with both 3.97 and 3.98 when using VBR. Other than that 3.98's VBR mode seems to be more robust than that of 3.97. In case the eig sample behavior can be at least partially generalized towards pre-echo behavior 3.98's pre-echo behavior has improved as well. The beforementioned problems are rather severe and to the extend they are audible they're pretty Lame-specific. However as you consider using CBR320: even though 3.97b1 was very poor with trumpet, at CBR320 this was not annoying (though easily abxable). In general a brute force strategy like using CBR320 is able to significantly soften even severe encoder problems. To me this is mainly an argument for using 3.98. 3.98 has overcome serius problems 3.97 has, and for the not-so-much-tested-as-3.97 argument a high bitrate to me is enough for me to feel secure. As for joint vs. plain stereo: I don't see any experience that stands against the basically superior joint stereo mode. Using very high bitrate IMO it's sufficient to use CBR 256 or ABR ~260. You save ~ 20% of file size against CBR 320 while not having to fear a really lower quality. Because of 3.98's improved VBR behavior -V1 is worth considering too IMO. From previous 3.98 versions I know -V1 can improve quality against -V2 while -V0 isn't worth considering against -V1.