Notes by ff123
Info2, in his r3mix site (see analysis section), states that the only VBR alternative to 256kbs CBR for transparent encoding is Lame; Xing is eliminated for poor performance, and the FhG implementations he tested use a 16kHz cutoff for VBR encoding, even at the highest quality setting.
That's not quite the complete story.
In the graphs below, I plot the encoder response for Radiohead's "Bones" (the entire song). I chose two different VBR quality selections: 100% and 70%.
1. Proteron EasyMP3 version 1.1.0 allows bandwidth control via the bitrate setting. The manual says that "VBR uses the bitrate setting as a minimum bitrate." But if it works the same way as Cool Edit Pro, VBR is actually using the maximum bandwidth of the CBR setting as its own maximum bandwidth.
2. Cool Edit Pro with the "MP3 ME" plugin allows direct bandwidth control. See David Robinson's picture of the Cool Edit Pro control panel at his site. Below, I show the default settings for Cool Edit Pro 1.2 with the MP3 ME plugin: VBR 100% and VBR 70%.
3. Sound Forge 4.5h allows VBR bandwidth control via the bitrate slider, similar to Proteron EasyMP3. This is an apparently undocumented feature.
4. MusicMatch Jukebox version 6.00.0270 allows for greater than 16 kHz cutoff VBR, but only if encoding directly from CD, and only if the user selects the maximum bandwidth manually. If the user converts a .wav file to .mp3, the cutoff is 16 kHz, even if the user selects the maximum bandwidth manually. This is apparently a MusicMatch Jukebox bug, because the program should behave the same way whether music is being converted from the CD or from a .wav file.
There may be others (such as Nero), but I haven't tested them.
Fraunhofer bases their VBR implementation on their FastEnc codec. Unfortunately, Sound Forge 4.5h (commp3dll, version 1.0, build 219) and MusicMatch 6 implement the latest version of FastEnc, which has a bug in it that makes encoded files sound "dry" or lacking in reverberation (see my Bug in latest FastEnc page).
Therefore, because of Sound Forge 4.5h's and MusicMatch 6's FastEnc flaw, I recommend that Cool Edit Pro with the MP3 ME plugin or Proteron EasyMP3 1.1.0 be used to make the highest quality FhG VBR files.
I have included Lame graphs for comparison.
Click on the thumbnail images to zoom.
| Encoder/setting | Frequency Response |
| Original clip | |
| Encoder/setting | Frequency Response | Encoder/setting | Frequency Response | |
| Cool Edit, Max BW=22050 Hz VBR 100% effective bitrate=230kbs |
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Cool Edit, Max BW=19170 Hz VBR 70% effective bitrate=167kbs |
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| Proteron EasyMP3 1.1.0 Filter for CBR 256 VBR 100% effective bitrate=230kbs |
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Proteron EasyMP3 1.1.0 Filter for CBR 192 VBR 70% effective bitrate=164kbs |
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| Encoder/setting | Frequency Response | Encoder/setting | Frequency Response | |
| Lame 3.87a (RH), -V1 effective bitrate=203kbs |
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Lame 3.87a (RH), -V4 effective bitrate=150kbs |
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