mp3 - poor quality, since upgrading to 1.3

[sagetyrtle]

I noticed after upgrading to 1.3 that the mp3 quality had degraded from the previous version.

It's not a big deal; I just save as WAV and convert using DBpoweramp (and then the quality is just fine; both are 128 and 44.1) but I was wondering if anything had changed from 1.2 to 1.3, some setting that would explain why the mp3 quality has degraded.

[kozikowski]

<<<I just save as WAV >>>

No, you don't. You Export as WAV. That's a sore point between the users and the developers.

We note that the MP3 presets are very different between the two versions. Are you setting the same values (as much as possible) in both?

It's very difficult to tell the additional options for Audacity 1.2 because all they let you set is bit rate. Lame itself, however, will let you set thousands of encoding options. Do you get the same size export file?

I'm betting not.

Koz

[Gale Andrews]

MP3s exported from 1.2 are Constant Bit Rate (CBR) and I think the quality algorithm specified is only -q5 (on a scale going up to 0). I don't "think" that -q setting changed with 1.3 but the main advantage 1.3 should have is that it supports variable bit rate. This means that when the material gets harder to encode, more bits are used (and vice-versa), so the perceived quality does not vary so much, while you get a higher quality file for a given file size. However this is pretty broken in 1.3 and in most cases it will spew out a CBR whatever you ask for, though it does mainly respect the requested bit rate. So given 1.2 was CBR anyway, it should not generally sound worse.

To get round all this, put LAME (not the compiled binary like lame_enc.dll) in the same folder as the Audacity executable, and choose the Audacity command line encoder ("external program") when you export.

Gale

[orgelquaeler]

I have this same problem using 1.3.4. No matter what constant bitrate I specify, the sound quality is terrible. If I export as a WAV and convert to Mp3 using Itunes (128kbps), it sounds just fine. At first I thought it was my mastering technique (leaving too much noise, etc...), but after trying with I-Tunes, i realized it was the program. Problem is, I don't trust Itunes for digital conversion, as I have hit other problems with its encoder (long portions of audio erased, artifacts, etc...). Any suggestions?

[steve]

There are known problems with exporting as MP3 in the current beta version of Audacity (1.3.5)

To get round all this, put LAME (not the compiled binary like lame_enc.dll) in the same folder as the Audacity executable, and choose the Audacity command line encoder ("external program") when you export.

An alternative workaround is to Export as WAV, then use an external program to do the MP3 encoding. On Windows computers I use LameDrop, which is very easy to use,very good, and free software. You simply drag and drop files onto LameDrop, and it encodes them to whatever quality settings you have set in its preferences.