Metallic ringing artifact-XviD 2 VCD with tooLAME in TMPGEnc

[DRP]

Subject line pretty much says it all, but I'm new to all this and would appreciate some advice. I read in the guide that tooLAME is the best MP2 encoder to use within TMPGEnc for audio quality and from reading various postings in this forum that seems to be a widely held opinion.

So taking that advice on board I duly D/L'd it (v0.2l) and gave it a shot. Unfortunately the end result was audio which has horrible high-pitched metallic ringing artifacts - about as pleasant to listen to as a dentist's drill.

The source video is XviD format with a VBR MP3 audio soundtrack with an average bitrate of 131kbps and no, the ringing artifacts are not present or audible in the original AVI. This problem only arises when converting to VCD and thus re-encoding to MP2.

If I'm already using the best software and MP2 encoder available for this task, how do I go about getting rid of this noise?

Thanks,

DRP

[sterno]

Most of the time "metallic" audio is a result of tmpgenc's poor sample rate converter. Was your source material 48kHz?

Install ssrc as your sample rate converter in tmpgenc's external audio tools. Alternatively, if you have a new enough version of tmpgenc supposedly there is an option for "high quality" somewhere that will also take care of it.

[DRP]

Most of the time "metallic" audio is a result of tmpgenc's poor sample rate converter. Was your source material 48kHz?

Install ssrc as your sample rate converter in tmpgenc's external audio tools. Alternatively, if you have a new enough version of tmpgenc supposedly there is an option for "high quality" somewhere that will also take care of it.

Thank you for this answer. Yes the source was 48kHz. I have downloaded SSRC but will try your second suggestion first as I'd like to limit the amount of video editing software I need as much as possible before it gets too out of hand

I have the latest version of TMPGEnc Plus - v2.513.53.162 and yes I have now found the 'High quality (low speed)' setting for the sampling frequency converter - so I'm giving it another go with this checked. I didn't see this setting the first time around, so hopefully this'll fix it.

They're not kidding about the 'low speed' bit either I'll give you the tip. The audio extraction process is running about 1/10th of the speed that it did before with 'Low quality (high speed)' checked.

DRP

[kazzer]

I had the very same problem with 'metallic' audio. I had tried tooLame (selecting it as the audio encoder from within TMPGEnc), but I still had the same problem. Then I tried BeSweet and it worked wonders