Audio Bitrates

[Drewa311]

most of you will laugh but i have to ask. I have these .RM files that im converting to mp3, obviously the sound quality suck, i was wondering what bitrate i should encode tham at and if there are any programs out there that will help me docter them up a bit. any help or advice would be great, thanks in advance-drew

[xequence]

If the quality is already bad it will be even worse to transcode them to another lossy format.

Id just suggest not transcoding them at all, leave them as .rm.

[Drewa311]

.rm sucks, id rather sacrifice a bit of quality to make these files play in itunes, i was just wondering if using a VBR would be better, i read that 128 kbs should sound the same, im doing this for a bunch of old school house mixes 77-95 so the quality wasnt amazing to begin with, i also know there has to be a program i could batch run these files through to make them sound better over all???? like i said most people here at TTD are quality nuts, i love quality but i wont limit myself. any help???

[woj]

when i have done this in the past, i've used streambox ripper to decode the realaudio to wav and then encode to mp3 with lame on a vbr setting and let it decide what bitrate is needed according to its psychoacoustic model. you can play around with the target bitrate if you need to balance filesize against sound quality. i usually have found that "-V 4 --vbr-new" is sufficient for me for transcoded realaudio but have stepped up to "-V 2 --vbr-new" in some cases as well, if the original realaudio was particularly low in quality.

lots of info about lame settings at http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=LAME

hope this helps.

eta: generally speaking, the mp3 will be larger in size than your realaudio original. that's the nature of the beast, unfortunately, since if you were to set the mp3 target bitrate at around the same rate as the realaudio original, the mp3 will more than likely sound worse than the original!