Lame 387 VRB question, bitrate?

[Zucchini]

I've been encoding my mp3s with the strictly enforce minimum bitrate option turned on. The problem is that it seems to freeze the bitrate counter in winamp. Also, is it better to use average bitrate? Right now i'm using VRB "strictly enforce minimum bitrate(128kbs), targeted bitrate 192kbs, max (320kbs)

 

[Workin']

I use LAME 3.87 (through CDEX) with these settings: VBR3, min. 96kbps, max. 256kbps, J-stereo, High Quality. Getting average bitrates around 160+/- kbps. Winamp works fine with my files. Actually, I haven't found any that don't work properly (at least from the bitrate counter point of view!).

If by average bitrate you mean the setting for the bitrate display in Winamp I don't think it makes a difference.

Don't know if that helps.

 

[PliotronX]

ABR is still under heavy development, so it's best to use VBR for best quality/size compromise and CBR 256 for best quality regardless of size.

Disable the enforce minimum bitrate because this causes LAME to not use 32Kbps for analog silence which leads to larger filesize unnecessarily. With minimum bitrate enforced disabled, LAME will never go below the minimum bitrate anyways. What contradicts the average bitrate for VBR files is the -V setting. You'll have to experiment with -V to find out how high it can go before you start to hear artifacts. You should visit r3mix.net if you haven't already, especially the forums. That site is addictive 🙂

Is "Show average bitrate on VBR files" checked under the decoder plug-in's settings? If so, this may be why the bitrate on WinAMP froze.