The best way to achieve a mp3 file.

[Djentkitty]

and i'm not quite sure what you mean by that last bit, the AAC encoder encodes.. um.. AAC files, and not MP3s

oops.. . I meant I think ACC is probably one of the best sounding/top quality codecs for compressing audio files, especially at 320kb/s. I use iTunes as my default player and ACC is 100% compatible with iTunes so.

 

[Tommy Evans]

A bit OT, but anybody messin' with .ogg files? I've heard oggs sound miles better than any mp3/wav file. Any thoughts?

 

[jotun725]

I don't think .ogg would sound better than .wav. Although .ogg is lossless, it's a conversion of the original file type. At best it would be identical.

 

[tobin1]

Probably very little noticeable difference between a normal DAW conversion than a program that solely does it.

 

[dani]

the difference in mp3 converters is tenuous at best, although some people swear by them. the mp3 standard is well defined though.. so there isn't that much room for headroom.

I don't think .ogg would sound better than .wav. Although .ogg is lossless, it's a conversion of the original file type. At best it would be identical.

sorry to nitpick, but ogg is not loss less besides, if it was lossless, then by definition it must sound exactly the same as the source, not any worse (or better).

 

[aortizjr]

.ogg - Lossy and to many sounds better than MP3. Was developed because MP3 is actually a proprietary algorithm that is licensed. I used to use it exclusively to support open formats. After several rounds of trying to convert band members and clients to use it, I gave up. Just too little supports it.

Since the MP3 algorithm is proprietary, LAME uses a different algorithm that provides a compatible format and is open source (not sure on the license). So pretty much any free or inexpensive encoder will be using LAME under the hood.

LAME has a ton of options and depending on the presets will make things sound better or worse. Some tricks include low and high pass filters or even another filter to reduce artifacts and compression. Variable bit rates and such also help immensely. So different front-ends may pass different options, but many will allow customization.

Compared to a direct Cubase export to MP3, I find LAME to sound better at similar bit rates. Also I don't have to wait for a full re-export. My compy can MP3 encode pretty quickly and typically I need both WAV's and MP3's.

For a front-end I prefer XrecodeII (windows). It encodes many formats and can do multi-threaded encoding based on the number of processors. I even use it to encode/decode archived sessions into Wavpack files (lossless with over 50% compression ratios).

 

[jotun725]

Thanks for the correction on that. So many formats out there to keep track of. It's still a pretty damn good format overall.