How to Create the Ultimate Lossy Library
Reply #9 – 2011-10-17 09:54:18
As for the questions towards me: a) I am always thinking in terms of 'average bitrate', and no matter the setting I'd always find out by encoding a test set of music representative of my collection. 10 to 20 tracks are sufficient to get a sufficiently precise impression. b) If you want to experiment with settings and quality I'd start with the 96 kbps listening test settings as I said. So in the case of CVBR: '--cvbr 96 --highest --samplerate keep'. I have no personal experience with iTunes, so can't give advice here. Just another suggestion: I'd try to find a good way of doing things, but not try to find the 'ultimate way of creating a lossy collection' within a huge bunch of varying parameters. You have set up your framework as far as I can see (Quicktime AAC at low to moderate bitrate). So just decide upon CVBR or TVBR according to your feelings on a full or restricted allowance to choose bitrate - you won't get differentiating facts, just consider both as being equally fine. And do some tests to see at what settings you're totally satisfied with quality. LC-AAC is what you should be interested in, kind of standard AAC. There's also HE-AAC aka AACplus, which improves quality for very low bitrate because of a much simplified way of encoding high frequencies leaving space for a better accuracy of the more important frequencies. At 96 kbps and above HE-AAC should be avoided. Also you can't play HE-AAC with every AAC playing device.