Hi Cheryl,

the results that RM delivers when recording to MP3 VBR format seem to be a bit strange in terms of bitrate distribution.

I started wondering about the file size of some VBR 192k recordings which seemed to not much differ from what you expect from a CBR 192k recording. Which is actually not the goal of VBR.

Let's look at an example: the famous Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen, which as a long and highly dynamical track is an ideal candidate to apply the benefits of VBR technology.

Using the Encspot console utility to decode the mp3 header you get the following output which illustrates that 99% of all frames are recorded in 192k:


Queen-Bohemian Rhapsody (VBR 192).mp3
-------------------------------------

Bitrates:
------------------------------------------------------------
192 |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| 99.1
224 0.6
256 0.3
320 0.0
------------------------------------------------------------

Type : mpeg 1 layer III
Bitrate : 192
Mode : joint stereo
Frequency : 44100 Hz
Frames : 13552
Length : 00:05:54
Av. Reservoir : 367
Emphasis : none
Scalefac : not used
Bad Last Frame : no
Encoder : Lame 3.99

Lame Header:

Quality : 60
Version String : Lame 3.99
Tag Revision : 0
VBR Method : vbr-new / vbr-mt
Lowpass Filter : 17500
Psycho-acoustic Model : nspsytune
Safe Joint Stereo : yes
nogap (continued) : no
nogap (continuation) : no
ATH Type : 5
ABR Bitrate : 192
Noise Shaping : 1
Stereo Mode : Joint Stereo
Unwise Settings Used : no
Input Frequency : 44.1kHz


Is this intentionnal, or is it a problem in RM or even LAME?

Independent of the answer to this question, I would like to see an option in RM that allows to specify the pretty well known and widely used "LAME quality settings" V x, as described under http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index....coder_settings

Regards
Karsten