[vorbis] make lo-fi sound as good as RealAudio?

[gtgbr at gmx.net]

Derek at CD Baby wrote:
> Can someone who really knows the Ogg command-line encoder, help recommend the best setting for 33.6k modem stereo music streaming?

Hah ... I just made an .rm, 32kb stereo music (normal and "high").
Looking at filesizes and compared to Vorbis, -q -1 --resample 22050
sounds better to my ears at a slightly smaller filesize.

I haven't checked out the 24kbps modes of RA, yet, but my guess is that
Vorbis can compete well. The sound is different - Vorbis is more squishy
while RA sounds more metallic/harsh ...

Play around a little with resampling, mono and different q-values,
you'll find a nice/working mode eventually. I see no reason to use
bitrate management either, but if everything else fails (bitrate peaks
due to rare/uncommon music), it might help, too. Note that using bitrate
management (--managed and the -b parameters, plus optional -m and -M) is
pretty confusing with resampling and downmixing ... :( Finding a working
-b is hard - there's currently no way to get a valid range per input
format. By trial and error, I found that for 22.5kHz stereo music, the
lowest possible -b is 30. The line looked like this:

oggenc --managed -b 30 --resample 22050 input.wav

(30 kbps is the nominal bitrate for 22.5kHz input at -q -1)

My test song came out 32kbps with -q -1, and 30kbps with -b 30. Quality
is about the same ...

<p>Moritz
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