how can i improve the audio quality?

[fei28000]

anyone know a good software that does this?

[Truman]

My favorite tools are azid for AC3 to WAV decoding.
-cnormal -L-3db
SSRC for 48->44,1kHZ downsampling
--rate 44100 --twopass --normalize --dither 2 --bits 16
tooLAME for MPEG-1 Layer-2 encoding
-m j -b 128

DVD2AVI's audio decoder is also very good, if you also want to downsample with DVD2AVI, I suggest to use 48->44,1 ultrahigh. It is worth the extra time.

You can use toolame and ssrc also as external tools in TMPGEnc.

[Hateslife]

MPEG-1 Layer 2 isn't nearly as good as Layer 3 (MP3). 224 kbps Mp2 barely sounds as good as 128kbps mp3, and while that's still better than VHS, it's not very good.

Also, TMPG is kind of a bitch about using external tools. Half the time it crashes, and it makes multiple temporary files, eating HD space. Since the resulting file will probably be a-synced anyway, might as well do it seperately.

[Truman]

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MPEG-1 Layer 2 isn't nearly as good as Layer 3 (MP3).
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You are right, but for (S)VCD Layer-2 is required.
I used TMPG with the external tools for few conversions, but it never crashed. Well, I do always the audio encoding seperately.