TMPEGenc audio quality... toolame... etc

[Statick]

hey all, new guy here

Been converting a bunch of mpegs to vcd over the past few weeks.

After reading in the tmpegenc guide on this website, that the audio quality could be improved by using external encoders, i decided to give it a go - the audio it was creating was ok and certainly listenable, but nothing special

Ive tried toolame and since, maenc - but both of them seem to be much much worse than the built-in encoder

the audio quality sounds as if its been recorded at 22khz or less, or perhaps, encoded at 64kbps or less... its got that trademark metallic grit associated with low-quality digital audio, despite using the standard VCD settings that i normally use - which normally give acceptable picture and audio quality for the format. using these 3rd-party encoders renders a video almost unwatchable due to the awful sound quality.

can anyone shed any light on this? i would certainly love to improve the audio quality of tmpegenc (i'm an audio engineer by trade, so my ears are v sensitive!) but despite following the recommendations, things only seem to get worse

any help will be greatly appreciated

...statick

[Tommyknocker]

There is also SSRC. You may want to give that a shot as well.

[sammie]

Well, the TMPEGEnc sound quality is a LOT better than it used to be. So you probably don't need to use a third party encoder for a lot of things. But I've been using tooLame from TMPEGenc ever since they made it so easy to do. I've never had any problems like you describe (in fact what you describe sounds like what TMPEGEnc used to do to audio files sometimes). Seems like something must be set up wrong somewhere. I'd suggest at least removing and then re-downloading the latest version of tooLame.

SSRC is usually used for converting the sampling rate from 48 to 44.1 or vice versa.

[hiptune]

Hi Statick,

There is a check box for high quality audio in tmpegenc. Many folks have not seen that one. There is normal and high. So if you check the higher quality box it does help, and can make your VCD watchable. Not as good as it really should be, but much better

I do lots of Concert / Performance LDs to VCD. And I have noticed that when I have an older LD (when they were semi rough sounding) the sound is really poor, worse than I expected. When I use a later one, say a 1985 or later mastered LD, with better sound, I notice less of a decline in sound on the VCD.

My version of tmpegenc will not use an external sound encoder. I think I need to use the paid version? Because I could not get TooLAME to load into the tmpegenc slot where you bring it up when encoding the Mpeg file.

Jeff

[mgh]

TOOLAME is to be loaded via- Options-Environmental Setting-External Tool

[sammie]

Good poing mgh. Static, did you notice if tooLame's DOS window popped up before video encoding started? It should if you had everything set up right. Actually, it's so automatic to me I'd forgotten about the high quality audio checkbox. It does sound like you didn't gett tooLame set up right and encoded using the native TMPEGEnc audio on low quality.

[beyondgoodandevil]

i haven't upgraded my copy of tmpgenc since july but unless there's been a great difference since then, the audio quality of the program is awful. i think it somehow encodes the source audio and then re-encodes the source file again to make your final product. the first video i made, i selected LPCM audio and it came out just as you described. now what i do is use goldwave [shareware] to get the audio and besweet [freeware] if i want to encode to ac3. the only problem with this method is that the beginning of the encoded video can't be after the actual beginning of the file or the audio & video will be off sync (they need to start from the same place).