Skip to main content ↑ ↓

Notice

Please note that most of the software linked on this forum is likely to be safe to use. If you are unsure, feel free to ask in the relevant topics, or send a private message to an administrator or moderator. To help curb the problems of false positives, or in the event that you do find actual malware, you can contribute through the article linked here.
Topic: Lame 3.94a13 (Read 16271 times) previous topic - next topic
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Lame 3.94a13

Reply #25 –
Track tested: BT - Never Gonna Come Back Down

Portable (135kbps) - distinctly warbling highs, distorts very badly in complex areas.
Portable1 (146kbps) - warbling sound bursts much shorter, more localized in time. Loses the "tone" or "color" of sibilants.
Portable2 (123kbps) - more watery than Portable1, but sounds /better/ in some bizarre way, if the watery sound could be removed.
Portable3 (128kbps) - sibilants masked a little; otherwise, much like p1, except that they warble more in different places.

Overall rating: P << P2 < P1,P3

Edit: I think a little less HF content would probably improve the situation. Right now, I'd much rather have a loss of high frequencies than the warbling and distortion being given as output.

Edit2: The standard 128 CBR encode without any command-line options would be grouped in with P1 and P3 in terms of quality to my ears, although I may be getting tired. Why the regression? And does anyone else find this?

Lame 3.94a13

Reply #26 –
Portable1 seems to produce files almost around the same size as the medium preset.  That would be unfortunate since portable1 appears to be the best...

Also, the medium preset will hopefully sound better than 3.90.2 aps -Y (which sounds pretty darn good!) since they both end up roughly around 170 kbps.

Lame 3.94a13

Reply #27 –
The portables presets should produce quite a lower bitrate than medium.
Do you have some cases where a "portable candidate" is producing the same kind of bitrate as medium?

Lame 3.94a13

Reply #28 –
I'm going to test the diferent presets with a group of diferent songs, and post the resulting average bitrate, just for having a idea...

It'll be ready in about... ¿2 hours?.
Just a thought...
 

Lame 3.94a13

Reply #29 –
The test is ready...

The tested music is a group of 16 100 seg fragments from the middle of some songs:

Aerosmith - Blind Man
Alanis Morissette - Ironic
Dire Straits - Brothers in Arms
Eric Clapton - Tears In Heaven
Metallica S&M - Nothing Else Matters
Mike Oldfield - Moonlight shadow
Phil Collins - Another Day In Paradise
Queen - Innuendo
Queen - The Show Must Go On
R.E.M - Losing My Religion
Santana - Smooth feat Rob Thomas
St Germain - Deep in it
The Cranberries - Animal Instinct
The Proclaimers - I'm gonna be 500 miles
U2 - Where The Streets Have No Name
Ultravox - Vienna


Results with Lame 3.94 alpha 13 --preset portable
=================================================

Songs Bitrate (in above order):
162.5  148.5  145.2  135.0  148.0  143.4  150.2  153.8
158.3  147.5  151.8  126.2  142.1  120.2  164.3  163.2

Average Bitrate: 146.5 kbps


Results with Lame 3.94 alpha 13 --preset portable1
==================================================

Songs Bitrate (in above order):
181.3  159.8  142.8  140.9  155.8  157.7  155.3  164.1
172.5  160.9  164.3  133.0  157.2  131.0  173.9  167.7

Average Bitrate: 156.7 kbps


Results with Lame 3.94 alpha 13 --preset portable2
==================================================

Songs Bitrate (in above order):
146.3  148.6  139.8  128.5  140.0  142.5  142.7  141.5
145.0  143.1  142.1  132.2  141.7  123.1  151.2  156.0

Average Bitrate: 140.5 kbps


Results with Lame 3.94 alpha 13 --preset portable3
=================================================

Songs Bitrate (in above order):
154.3  154.3  138.6  131.9  142.1  148.8  144.6  146.0
150.7  148.8  148.0  138.1  148.2  129.6  155.7  157.7

Average Bitrate: 145.3 kbps


AND JUST FOR REFERENCE:

Results with Lame 3.94 alpha 13 --preset medium
=================================================

Songs Bitrate (in above order):
191.1  173.9  181.5  165.0  189.2  164.7  180.7  180.2
184.1  169.6  179.3  148.3  161.9  140.0  204.3  203.8

Average Bitrate: 174.3 kbps


Results with Lame 3.94 alpha 13 --preset standard
=================================================

Songs Bitrate (in above order):
214.8  196.4  202.1  177.2  217.3  193.6  197.7  193.9
202.8  193.9  209.9  171.4  195.1  171.3  221.0  215.6

Average Bitrate: 197.3 kbps


For this goup of songs the reference --preset standard bitrate is very close to 200 kbps, however the --preset medium one is a bit over 165 kbps.


So, it seems to me that portable1 has a bitrate too high; and that's the reason it sounds clearly better than the others. I think it should be discarded, because it's too close to --preset medium bitrate. For this goup of songs portable, and portable3 are very close to each other (145 kbps), and portable2 a little lower (140 kbps).

I'm with Canar, maybe a little less HF content can improve the overall quality (less HF and also less "water" sound)... worth to try.

PS: A quality test is on the way... maybe tomorrow...
Just a thought...

Lame 3.94a13

Reply #30 –
Gabriel
Quote
  Do you have some cases where a "portable candidate" is producing the same kind of bitrate as medium?


Only among the tested ones:

Mike Oldfield - Moonlight shadow:  medium bitrate is only 7 kbps higher than portable1.
R.E.M - Losing My Religion:  medium bitrate  is only 8,7 kbps higher than portable1.
The Cranberries - Animal Instinct:  medium bitrate  is only 4,7 kbps higher than portable1.
The Proclaimers - I'm gonna be 500 miles:  medium bitrate  is only 9 kbps higher than portable1.

And this are random selected songs, so i'm sure there are even closer examples.
Just a thought...

Lame 3.94a13

Reply #31 –
A preset for movie-encodes would be great! So you can make DivX with good sound at lowbitrate!
What do you think of this idea?

Big_Berny

Lame 3.94a13

Reply #32 –
Quote
A preset for movie-encodes would be great! So you can make DivX with good sound at lowbitrate!
What do you think of this idea?

Big_Berny

Just pick --preset standard. It's most reliable. Alternately, pick the preset that corresponds to the bitrate you desire. A special preset for it is superfluous when you have the great presets that are available.

[edit]
Rather than creating another post, I was wondering just how much tuning on standard is applicable to other presets (ie. extreme, portable). Can you take the tunings from one, extrapolate them, and get another with a relative degree of accuracy? Or do they each have to be tuned separately?

Lame 3.94a13

Reply #33 –
Quote
Quote
A preset for movie-encodes would be great! So you can make DivX with good sound at lowbitrate!
What do you think of this idea?

Big_Berny

Just pick --preset standard. It's most reliable. Alternately, pick the preset that corresponds to the bitrate you desire. A special preset for it is superfluous when you have the great presets that are available.

[edit]
Rather than creating another post, I was wondering just how much tuning on standard is applicable to other presets (ie. extreme, portable). Can you take the tunings from one, extrapolate them, and get another with a relative degree of accuracy? Or do they each have to be tuned separately?

Audio-Bitrate of about 200kbits is too much for a movie, I would like about 96kbits. The audio for movies need not high frequencies, so there you could save bitrate.

Lame 3.94a13

Reply #34 –
Quote
Audio-Bitrate of about 200kbits is too much for a movie, I would like about 96kbits. The audio for movies need not high frequencies, so there you could save bitrate.

I disagree with you there. I'd rather have my movies sound the way the audio is, rather than chopping HF content out. Anyhow, movie scores aren't typically very musical or complex, so you'd likely end up with obscenely low bitrates. If you're looking for really low bitrates and are focussing on computer playback, I'd recommend Vorbis, which is much more capable at the low end of the scale.

This is all a matter of preference, however, and I can't see there being a great demand for a ~96kbps VBR preset.

Lame 3.94a13

Reply #35 –
I just use preset 128 for DivX encodes

Lame 3.94a13

Reply #36 –
I'm surprised no one has mentioned ABR for the portable preset. I still don't like the idea of VBR for a 140kbps target. In theory, yes, go VBR but I don't think LAME is suited for this task given its suboptimal performance at low bitrates.

May I suggest something like --preset 145 --lowpass 17.5 --nsmsfix 1.75 --shortthreshold 4.25,15 -X 1,3 -Z 1.

It's also nice that this ABR preset is about 75% faster than the portable presets.

I noticed that there has been a change to the joint stereo switching algorithm since the earlier alphas. Now, more often than not, LAME encodes MP3s with less L/R frames given the same --nsmsfix value...sometimes significantly less, like in one case 6% L/R for a12 and earlier and now 0.8% L/R for a13. This is rather strange...even the 1.75 value I list above is tentative. I was comfortable with --nsmsfix 2 for portable but it seems too conservative with a13.

I also noticed that when using ABR, LAME selects a lot more 256kbps and 320kbps frames (for 145kbps ABR target). This is not a problem, it's probably a good thing because with a13 it seems that ABR does actually average closer to what you specify. With earlier versions, --preset 145 tended to average around 140kbps.

Lame 3.94a13

Reply #37 –
yes. no- yes.

there are already abr settings with lame at these bitrates. eg. --alt-preset 128

I think a vbr try at low bitrates is...

at least a try.

just tune it for your pleasures...

the result shall not be for audiophile pleasures, but to outperform all abr settings at similar bitrate.

Lame 3.94a13

Reply #38 –
Quote
I'm surprised no one has mentioned ABR for the portable preset. I still don't like the idea of VBR for a 140kbps target. In theory, yes, go VBR but I don't think LAME is suited for this task given its suboptimal performance at low bitrates.

By introducing an ABR preset in the preset hierarchy, you are compromising the whole coherence of the bitrate table. For exemple, I must confess a bit critical, a quite piano track (stereo, digitally recorded, 3 minutes) :

Code: [Select]
1. extreme       => 179 kbps
2. standard      => 132 kbps
3. medium        => 57 kbps
4. portable VBR  => 45 kbps
4. portable ABR  => 137 kbps


Let imagine a newbie astonishment : --portable gives him a higher bitrate than --standard, two steps beyond in the quality scale ! Why ? This question will be for sure a future hit in the HA periodically asked question.


More generally, with classical stuff, an ABR setting as -portable preset gives nearly the same bitrate as -medium (I've encoded some discs with 3.93.1 at medium setting, and average bitrate is approx. 150-155 kbps).

Other problem : mono recordings. The extreme preset may be lower in space than ABR 145 encodings.

Maybe ABR setting is the easiest way to obtain a good quality with lame in the 130-150 kbps range. I don't know. But I'm sure that the coherency of the lame VBR project will be broken. Shame... Ahead MP4, MPC and Vorbis are showing a more logical behaviour
Wavpack Hybrid -c4hx6

Lame 3.94a13

Reply #39 –
For movies, use like 64bit vorbis and mux it with ogm file container (until matroska comes about).  Vorbis is well suited for saving bitrate for video.

Lame 3.94a13

Reply #40 –
Perhaps abr is still the best way to have correct quality around 130kbps.
But that does not really matters, you have to understand my goal.

Right now, Lame features a 10 points vbr scale. This one is quite old and inoptimal. I want to replace this scale by a new one (obviously bettter). So I need 10 vbr presets.

This does not means that you should use them if you want a 130 kbps encode. In fact, it's very likely that only presets down to medium will be available at first via --preset.

But, as an example, portable will be used when you select -V6, providing better quality than the current -V6.

Lame 3.94a13

Reply #41 –
About reusing tuning from presets to other presets:

Yes, some concepts (like different masking adjustment for long and short blocks) can be re-used from a preset to the lower preser. But there are still some points not always suitable to be re-used in the lower preset.

An example is the portable preset: while re-using some points of medium preset, there are important factor which might not be suitable for portable, like quantization selection. That is why there are now 4 drafts of portable presets, in order to select which way is the best one.

Lame 3.94a13

Reply #42 –
OK, I'm comfortable with what you are doing. I thought your intent was to make all the quality-oriented presets VBR (rather than bitrate-oriented presets) and figured that wasn't going to be the most optimal once you hit the lower target bitrates. But if you are trying to do the 10 point scale ala Vorbis and Musepack then the portable preset in a13 is an appropriate step.

Out of the four portable preset candidates, I dislike "portable" the most and think that "portable1" may be the best.

Lame 3.94a13

Reply #43 –
These new Portable Presets produce bad and watery sound.
I think that Lame 3.94--alt-preset 128 or Ogg Vorbis GT2 -b 128 sound much clearer.

Lame 3.94a13

Reply #44 –
This is great! Very eager for an 'optimized' VBR that yields bitrates in the 120-150 range!!! Of course I'll have re-encode all of my 3000 CBR 160 files again, but it will be worth it!

Lame 3.94a13

Reply #45 –
1.) Stravinsky, Rite of Spring, Les augures de adolescentes.

portable: 126kbps; watery, with obvious pre-echo and smearing in winds.
portable1: 118kbps; some pre-echo on string attacks.
portable2: 122kbps; flanging, watery sound.
portable3:  117kbps; some pre-echo on string attacks.

abchr ranking results: portable<portable2<portable3, portable1 (close).

2.) The Police, Walking on The Moon (remastered version).

portable: 148kbps; terrible! Hi-hats are very watery and metallic sounding; useless.
portable1: 153kbps; slight flanging in cymbals, but otherwise good.
portable2: 158kbps; heavy flanging, watery sound, similar to portable.
portable3: 161kbps; similar to portable1.

abchr ranking results: portable<portable2<portable3, portable1 (close).

3.) Dave Brubeck, Take Five

portable: 128kbps; watery, lots of flanging in center channel. Yuck! 
portable1: 134kbps; some flanging on cymbals, hi-hat not as discernable as in original.
portable2: 143kbps; watery sounding, piano and sax sound rumbly.
portable3: 148kbps; similar to portable1.

abchr ranking results: portable<portable2<portable3, portable1.

Portable and portable2 are useless, IMO. I was not able to ABX portable1 from portable3, so given the choice between the two, I would take portable1, as the bitrate was considerably lower than portable3. Taken as a whole, portable1 sounds the best, but (as of right now) doesn't seem to offer an advantage over something like --preset 140, which seems more stable and dependable than the VBR presets at this bitrate.

Lame 3.94a13

Reply #46 –
Gabriel: Are you planed more tuning for preset standard?
MPC: --quality 10 --xlevel (v. 1.15s) (archive/transcoding)
MP3:  LAME 3.96.1 --preset standard (daily listening/portable)

Lame 3.94a13

Reply #47 –
as a summary: for most people the presets portable 1 and 3 produce rather the same quality, whereas portable 3 gives most of the time smaller bitrates (but according to cygnus it doesn't like take 5 - beh).

maybe portable 3 should be our (your) choice. much smaller bitrates than medium and close to the quality of portable 1 (which produces sometimes medium-like bitrates).

Lame 3.94a13

Reply #48 –
Quote
I'd just like to mention that I firmly believe the goal for --preset standard should be virtual TRANSPARENCY, not a certain bitrate. If this version is improved, I would expect it to be a tad lower than the average for 3.90.2. Basically, it shouldn't be ABXable against --ap-s -z in 3.90.2. Please don't throw bits away on making it higher, or save bits in exchange for a certain target.

very good point.