[vorbis] When will quality increase be unnoticable?

[Moritz Grimm]

Øyvind,

<p>This is from your other email:

> 4. I think in bitrate terms too much. How should I think ? Hmm... I 
> still can't see anything wrong with referring to a certain bitrate and 
> talking about how well it sounds. An OGG encoded at nominal 128kbps is 

Thinking "bitrate" is a relic from times when MP3 had no or only bad
VBR. It's only valid today when talking about bandwidth issues, like
with streaming. Why are you talking about size and bandwidth when only
quality matters to you? That's why every VBR codec [i know], even MP3 in
VBR mode, has a quality setting. I don't know of any other VBR codec
than Vorbis that gives the users the luxury of some minimal clue about
the final size by the term "nominal bitrate". I think it's useful to
have this bit of predictability (especially since Vorbis features a
bitrate management mode and generally is very suitable for streaming),
but it's also often misleading. It's all about the -q. The encoder
doesn't even care about what nominal bitrate a q value comes with. The
nominal bitrate is a hint, nothing more. Also try to make sure that
you're not imagining things; your mind can play evil tricks on you. If
you don't believe that something at xxx bps can sound good, it won't
sound good to you. Your mind will invent something.

The only good way to prevent this would be ABX testing.

> during this process, but I still got lots to take from :). I want the
> source of my audio to be the best possible, for all purposes(My source
> is my computers). I like encoding at high bitrates, call me a nut ;).

Then a lossless codec like FLAC or LPAC or whatever is what you want. Or
why don't you just encode at -q 10 if Vorbis is enough? The files won't
be THAT much bigger, and at least to me q10 is like ... whoah damnit,
i'm getting lost between original and encoded version at -q 5 to -q 6
already. I don't think it's stupid to be that quality hungry, even if
oneself can't notice any difference. Many nice CDs I bought as a kid and
which got roughed up a lot during those times are hardly readable
anymore. ;P I wish I had such an high quality archive, since once CD
even got a crack that makes the first track unreadable.

Point is, just take the -q that you need, filesize will eventually
decrease when better/more efficient ways to store the same information
get implemented. Something between -q 8 and -q 10 will suit you forever
(unless you grow golden ears, and from what i've heard that's more like
a curse :( ), and with newer versions your rips become smaller and
smaller, and everybody is happy. \o/ *yay*

<p>Moritz

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