I rip CDs to FLAC and to mp3. For mp3, I use LAME with -V0 (best quality VBR). Generally, I find that the mp3 sound pretty much the same to me as the FLAC for the rock and even the jazz I typically play -- even on my better equipment.
Recently, I started looking more closely at the headers in my mp3 files, and got interested in learning more about the LAME header. The associated XING header - which is added with VBR encoding - contains a "Quality" indicator. When I use mp3diags to examine the XING headers for my files, it generally says quality=100, or sometimes as low as quality=97. At first I thought this was good. However, when I read up on the XING header spec, the I found that this 4-byte field is
"Quality indicator as Big-Endian DWORD
from 0 - best quality to 100 - worst quality (optional)"
I found similar references elsewhere. That is, there is agreement that 100=worst and 0=best.
I am baffled. I used the -V0 option. My files sound great (to me). How can they be "worst quality"?
Am I misinterpreting something here?
http://gabriel.mp3-tech.org/mp3infotag.html#quality (http://gabriel.mp3-tech.org/mp3infotag.html#quality)
Thank you very much, lvqcl.
Very interesting! I'm glad that you have a reference with the reverse rating. It makes more sense, given how I encoded my files.
Several references have it the other way:
On that very same page you cited, just a couple of paragraphs above, it says
// ZONE A - Traditional Xing VBR Tag data
// 4 bytes for Header Tag
// 4 bytes for Header Flags
// 100 bytes for entry (NUMTOCENTRIES)
// 4 bytes for FRAME SIZE
// 4 bytes for STREAM_SIZE
// 4 bytes for VBR SCALE. a VBR quality indicator: 0=best 100=worst
And here
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/8295/M...io-Frame-Header (http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/8295/MPEG-Audio-Frame-Header)
it says
8, 12, 16, 108, 112 or 116 4 Quality indicator as Big-Endian DWORD
from 0 - best quality to 100 - worst quality (optional)
Strange.
Many thanks for your kind reply!