The Song Fight Bulletin Board

Looking for anyone who has sucess with getting decent quality VBR out of Adobe Audition (formerly CEP).

I installed CoolLame, but the GUI doesn't expose the actual lame settings, and I can't tell what it is really doing. I tried encoding with both VBR and ABR and the time readout on the file was wrong in WinAmp.

When I encode with the built-in encoder, I get a good time stamp, but am unsure about the quality. Trying to beat down filesize but match 128stereo quality.

Any thoughts?

I might be misunderstanding you, but this is what I advise for VBR MP3 creation (discard the Audition MP3 encoder entirely and just export to WAV):

1. Download LAME 3.96.1 from here: http://www.rarewares.org/mp3.html (go to "Encoders/decoders built using LAME 3.96.1," then download the bundle)
2. Unzip that into a directory (say, C:\Program Files\LAME)
3. Download RazorLame at http://www.dors.de/razorlame/download.php
4. Unzip RazorLame into a directory (\LAME should be fine)
5. Open RazorLame. Go to Edit -> Options, and find lame.exe from step 2
6. Go to Edit -> LAME Options, then the Expert tab, then under "Custom options" enter the text "--alt-preset standard" verbatim as in the quotes. Check the box "Only use custom options." Hit OK.
7. To use RazorLame drag and drop, or use the Add button, to find .wavs (that is, export wavs from Audition and then drag them to here). Hit Encode and then it'll encode an mp3 to the same directory as the wav is from (though that's a configurable option, and you can also elect to have it delete the wav after processing the mp3).

the "--alt-preset standard" option tells LAME to encode with VBR. Most songs will fall in the 128-212kbps range, but in my experience it's usually 128-170kbps. Will sound fine. If you don't think it sounds fine, you can use "--alt-preset extreme" in step 6 instead, which will discard less audio information for the mp3 compression. APS (as it's called) is a good compromise, however, suitable, certainly, for SongFight. You'll have to edit the ID3 tags manually, but this will do the MP3 compression right.

HOWEVER, and this is more what you're asking... if you don't want to do that, you can forget the --alt-preset and "only use custom options" shit. Instead just navigate about the tabs: under General, hit up 128 kbps, mode Joint Stereo. Under Advanced hit up optimization: quality. Under VBR, it's probably wisest to enable it, and then you can make the maximum bitrate 128 (if you want to use smaller block sizes only for stuff like silence) or 160, or 192, or any other value (and then it'll behave more or less like APS). Under "Quality" there's numbers from 0-9: 0 is the most kbps and 9 is the least. Default is 4 and that should be fine. You can use ABR instead of VBR and go for 128 kbps, and that might be better for what you're after. But definitely use ABR over CBR if you aren't going to use VBR. It'll be a negligible difference in file size, but the quality should only be superior.

Ha ha ha. Good post, Marcus. Wish I could have saved you all the typing, but perhaps it will benefit someone else.

You see, I already do exactly what you advise. In fact, I use RazorLame even. And I hand tweak the parameters to fit the situation. I have several custom presets that I use for songfight, our website, and other situations.

Unfortunately, I was really asking on behalf of a friend of mind who doesn't want to muck with an external program. He just wants to get the best trade-off between quality and size directly out of Audition. The three parameters, in order of importance are:

1. correct time indication in the player, from the get-go, not 10 seconds in, once it's figured it out.

2. acceptable quality (it's a podcast, not a cd)

3. minimum file size (it's a big podcast)

Thanks, anyway. Really. It's the thought that counts.

OK! That's fine. I'm going to repost my thing to the other MP3 thread here (it seems to me my advice will be useful to those cats there).

I have found the solution to this problem, though, too.

1. Go to that same site: http://www.rarewares.org/mp3.html
2. Download the CoolLAME Filter, "Filter for Cool Edit and Adobe Audition that uses lame_enc.dll for MP3 encoding"
3. Extract the contents of the .zip to C:\Program Files\Adobe\Audition 1.5 (for example)
4. In Audition, when you have the full podcast loaded and ready for saving, go to File -> Save As. Under "Save as type:" select "MPEG layer-3 (LAME) (*.mp3)." Then you can hit up "Options," Preset: ABR, CBR/ABR bitrate 128 (for example). With the "Save extra non-audio information" you might even get the ID3 information already saved, if you have the title and author in the Audition information for the session.

HTH

I have tried this. The time is initially incorrect in WinAmp.

It would be pretty cool if there were an online gizmo that let you upload an audio file and automatically MP3-ized it according to the boxes you checked, then just dumped it back at you.

Ideally, it would do this on the fly somehow so the server didn't have to hold either the upload or the output.

This is apropos of almost nothing, but somebody get on this.

jb