Best MP3 encoder

farss wrote on 4/30/2004, 3:56 PM
Client is paying me good money to convert libraries of audio from both DAT and CD to mp3. So far I'm just using the mp3 encoder that comes with Vegas and the results are excellent. Probably given the material I'm working with the mp3 encode is the least of the materials problems.
However I'm wondering are there better encoders available. I've heard of MP3Pro but I seem to recall the results without a matching player are worse than vanilla mp3.
Also will any degree of preprocessing help the mp3 encoding? That maybe a dumb question but I'm from the video side where certain forms of encoding such as mpeg-2 benefit from removing unwanted artifacts such as noise, prior to encoding. I don't really want to alter the original material anymore than necessary, my aim as much as possible is to preserve the original content.

Comments

MJhig wrote on 4/30/2004, 7:16 PM
Farss,

You can't go wrong with the Vegas MP3 codec, it's the industry standard Fraunhofer IIS encoder.

Some tout the LAME encoder but in my experimentation LAME has a very subtle watery artifact to my ears.

Anyway, the most important criteria here is source material. If it's as you say you should be more than fine. Bit rate and destination devices are going to be the next big players here.


MJ
farss wrote on 4/30/2004, 9:52 PM
MJ Thanks,
I thought it was the Fraunhofer encoder, just wasn't certain if there was anything better out there. I'll probably encode at 128 KBits, as I don't need to crunch it down too much and I see some players will not play anything higher.
Bob.
Rednroll wrote on 5/1/2004, 9:04 AM
If you want to compress in .MP3 and probably get the best compression to loss ratio, I would recommend 192Kbs.

Here's a study I did awhile back starting with a 10 Meg Pink Noise Stereo file using a few different compression methods. You can probably look at these results and get a better idea of what is exceptable for what you are doing.

http://mediasoftware.sonypictures.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=19&MessageID=215681
bgc wrote on 5/1/2004, 1:29 PM
The Fraunhaufer is a very good encoder for MP3.