LAME ???

[mich]

Can any music lovers tell me what LAME is (as a codec) and how does it compare to the normal mp3?

 

[tom982]

Hello mich and welcome to the forums

I, personally, stick to LAME as it's so widely available and accepted. There is a great review of the four biggies here:

Ars Technica: Do MP3 Encoders Sound Different? - Page 1 - (3/2000)

[FONT=Arial,Helvetica]he envelop please:[/FONT] [FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica]Low bit rate winner (128 kbs):[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica]Fraunhofer. It was no contest. While not CD quality, the FhG encoder was sonically the least offensive. And with its superior measurements, it clearly beat out the other encoders at 128 kbs. If you have a tiny hard drive or a portable MP3 player with only 32 MB of memory, this is the encoder to use.[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica]High bit rate winners (192 and 256 kbs):[/FONT]
[FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica]Fraunhofer, LAME, Blade, and Xing (in order of preference). At the higher bit rates they don’t all sound the same, but the encoders in general were very listenable. I found the Xing high frequency measurements a bit worrisome, but at 256 kbs I thought the Xing encoder sounded as good as the rest. If you are "[/FONT][FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica]Napsterizing[/FONT][FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica]" some music, I think 192 kbs is a good compromise between sound quality and download times. For my personal MP3 CD-R disks, I encode at 256 kbs. This is still more than 7 CDs on one CD-R.

[/FONT]Unless you have a good reason not to, such as if you're in the business and don't have a LAME license, then I would just stick to LAME to be honest. I've never had any issues with it.

Tom

 

[mich]

Thanks, if I rip a CD in media player to mp3 @320kbps what am I using ?? is it LAME if not what is it and what is the difference?

 

[tom982]

It's the default Windows encoder, it's not LAME. I've read mixed things about the WMP MP3 encoder, but I would be very impressed if anyone can tell the difference between a 320kbps song ripped with any encoder to be honest. I use WMP to rip my CDs just for ease of use, it's great at setting the tags and grabbing the artwork etc., but if you're looking for quality then EAC (Exact Audio Copy) is the best around:

A Perfectionist's Guide to Audio CD Extraction and Lossless Compression

It's a pain to set up, and I couldn't work it out last time I tried it.

Tom

 

[mich]

I have EAC Tom very good to copy, I d/l FLAC and convert to CD via Ashampoo, no problems. but I can tell the difference between mp3 and FLAC on classical recordings (I am not listening on PC or mp3 player but my HiFi unit) and am told I could not possibly tell the difference so I suppose I am sounding out what others think.

 

[tom982]

FLAC eats disk space too fast for my liking, it's not worth it for the quality gain in my opinion, plus I can't play them on my phone or iPod etc.

On a decent speaker system, it's much easier to distinguish the two, the person who told you probably meant for headphones or a sub-standard system

Tom

 

[mich]

Yeh he says he has a good set up but I think he is full of "you know what" Thanks anyway.

 

[tom982]

Haha, I know the type!

No problem, happy listening!

Tom