mp3's with spectro's that look nearly like flacs

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RockHard
Posts: 3
Joined: Fri Sep 16, 2016 4:21 am

mp3's with spectro's that look nearly like flacs

Post by RockHard »

I sometimes run across an mp3 that has a spectro close to what I'd expect from a flac & wondering if anyone knows if there's a lame encoder that can do that. If I process something thru Goldwave with the 3.99 lame encoder I have, the best spectro I can get is about to 20.3 khz @ 320. I can't find anything on the net about an advanced lame encoder. Is there a secret encoder being held back for just a few in the know?
DougDbug
Posts: 2172
Joined: Wed Feb 16, 2005 3:33 pm
Location: Silicon Valley

Re: mp3's with spectro's that look nearly like flacs

Post by DougDbug »

I'm not sure. There is a lowpass filter switch and "scale factor 21" switch that affect the high frequencies. You can't access these switches from GoldWave. You have to use the command line . (LAME Command Line Switches).

There is at least one special version of LAME, but I've forgotten what the difference is. And of course there are other (non-LAME) MP3 encoders.

But... It's important to know that LAME is optimized for sound quality. It's not optimized for making good-looking spectrums. You can tweak the encoder or use a different compression algorithm in order to get a nicer looking spectrum but you might end-up damaging the stuff you can hear.

There may be some rare cases where it would sound better keeping the high frequencies. But, at higher bitrates the defaults should give you transparent encoding* with most music. And once you have transparent encoding there can be no "improvement". Usually, if you hear a compression artifact you're not hearing the loss of high frequencies.

Even if you can hear up to 20kHz in a hearing test, that doesn't mean you can hear the 20kHz components in music. These higher frequencies are quieter than the other sounds and masked (drowned-out) by other sounds. That's how lossy compression works... The psychoacoustic encoder tries to throw-away stuff that you can't hear... It's lossy compression so it's going to throw-away information and it would be silly to throw-away something you can hear make room for high frequencies you can't hear.
I have, the best spectro I can get is about to 20.3 khz @ 320.
If you want to go above that, you 'll probably have to tweak the settings, plus you might need a sample rate of 48kHz.



P.S.
You can use a Harmonic Exciter Effect to "restore" the higher frequencies, but then you'd have to save as FLAC or WAV to keep them from getting thrown-away again.

* Transparent means you can't reliably hear a difference in a scientific, blind, level matched ABX listening test.
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