192

[BriAsylum13]

I really love MusicBee, but, I can't figure out the file converter. Can someone please tell me how I can make all my tracks 192K...Joint Stereo.


P.S. Is cbr or vbr better? I just really want consistency with all my music.  Same bit rate..etc.

[frankz]

Make sure you have Lame somewhere on your computer then go to Edit->Edit Preferences->File Converters...encoding... and set the path to Lame there.

The various quality settings are there for you to use or set yourself.  The MB command line for joint stereo (the default) cbr at 192 would be: --cbr -b 192 --noreplaygain - [outputfile]

I don't know what --noreplaygain does, but it's there.  I think lame replaygain encoding doesn't work right or isn't accurate.  Not sure.

VBR is better.  With CBR you are using the rate for every single frame of audio whether it's silence or complicated.  More complicated frames of audio obviously need more bits to encode, but you're not allowing for that.  Silence needs 0 bits, but you're wasting bits on it.  For most people -V2 is indistinguishable from the source.  I use -V0 although I could probably use V1 and get away with it there's a placebo effect.  Variable settings go from 0 at the best (largest files) to 9 at the worst (smallest files).

With VBR you obviously won't get "consistency," though, because it's variable.

[boroda]

also any conversion makes sense only if you convert from lossless format (eg. flac) or if you rip cd's.

conversion from one lossy format to another lossy one *always* will decrease sound quality.