MP3 export bit-rate
I think I detect slightly worse quality when listening to the MP3 files I export directly from MS, compared to exporting a WAV file from MS and converting it to MP3 using Audacity.
Audacity allows control over the MP3 conversion bit-rate, but unless I missed it MS does not. An MP3 file encoded by Audacity at 128kbps ends up as exactly twice the size of the equivalent MP3 file exported directly from MS; that suggests MS is encoding at 64kbps?
Is there some way to change the LAME bit-rate setting that MS uses?
[Currently using 03dc014 with Windows XP]
Steve
Comments
If I remember correctly the bit rated for mp3 export had been changed recently, to a lower value.
And indeed that is 64, see mscore/exportmp3.cpp, line 648 , change to this in ebfc2dde on 30Dec2014
In reply to If I remember correctly the by Jojo-Schmitz
Confirmed by exporting and viewing the bit rate in WinAMP. Perhaps it's time for a feature request, adding in a user-settable bit rate value to the Export panel of Prefs.
In reply to If I remember correctly the by Jojo-Schmitz
64 Kbps is far too low, being equivalent to FM radio quality, which is gritty at best and downright distorted at worst.
Even 128 Kbps is a bit low - I can detect artifacts in high frequency sounds like cymabls and high hats with this encoding rate. (Or at least I used to be able to - sadly I have lost a lot of my highend frequency hearing over the last few years).
I always encode at 160Kbps which is enough to squash the file size considerably whilst maintaining a high degree of audio quality.
If we are going to set a fixed rate then it should be no lower than 128Kbps.
Incidentally when I tried exporting directly from a home build of MuseScore 2 development yesterday, the process hung and I had to stop MuseScore.
WAV export proceeded normally, however.
In reply to 64 Kbps is far too low, being by ChurchOrganist
128 is what the constructor uses. Gets overwritten now with 64, before with 0, whatever that means
In reply to 64 Kbps is far too low, being by ChurchOrganist
I've seen that too, both MP3 and WAV export seem to hang for a period, as indicated by the progress bar in the bottom left corner of the MS window. I let it sit and the process finishes eventually. This on an i7 quad 3.4Ghz, 8Gb RAM, 500Gb disk, no slouch of a system.