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Re: What mp3 quality do you want?

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charles_454545Jul 20, 2009
 

 
--- In just-a-minute@..., "eriatarkae@..." <eriatarkae@...> wrote:

>> So I think the best archival choice would be a high-quality bitrate (for sound quality), but a variable bitrate (to balance file size). In the mp3 encoder named "lame", I've been doing this with the "-V 0" argument.
>
> Just a quick technical point - from a transparency point of view lame V0 is overkill. V2 is sufficient for the psycho-acoustically same sound.

The overkill is Mostly Harmless -- it only comes out to a few MB -- but I think you're right because I just tried it both ways and can't hear any difference at all. I'll start using -V 2. ;)

> Better yet would be to rip the stream - in other words, to download the exact stream broadcast on iPlayer (as it is higher quality than on DAB), which avoids the compression process altogether. The file does as a result have the full 36 minutes broadcast on it, but with use of particular tools you can trim the excess without loss of audio quality.

That makes sense, but the JAM streams I get from both iPlayer and ABC RN are realaudio, which for better or worse is not a very portable/common compression format. If the BBC ever gets around to switching to AAC as they've discussed, IMO saving the raw feed would be exactly the thing to do.

> Out of interest, how do you capture your JAM mp3s (which I am hugely tremendously grateful for)?

For BBC shows: get_iPlayer --get --wav; then audacity to trim the ends.

For the ABC RN shows: mplayer -dumpstream -dumpfile jam.rm rtsp://media1.abc.net.au/broadcast/rn.rm; mplayer -ao pcm:file=jam.wav jam.rm; audacity to trim the ends, to remove the redundant second channel, to lightly boost ABC's weak volume and bass.

Those BBC and ABC wavs are converted to mp3 with lame -V 0 (or, now, -V 2), then I run a python script that sets the id3 tags and yells at me if I got the filename wrong wrt guests, air dates, etc.

cheers,
Charles

 
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