I need high quality sound, TMPGEnc isn't doing it.

[ndaher]

I'm currently using TMPGEnc PLUS to convert my home movies (DV avi format from firewire) to DVD-compliant mpgs, however no matter what I do the audio always sounds like garbage. I made sure to select 48khz/Stereo with 384kbps etc. but it still sounds like a 32kbps MP3 file. Is it just because TMPGEnc is very poor at converting audio? What program can I use or what can I do with TMPGEnc that will give me the same audio quality that I put in? My cam is a Sony DCR-TRV120 digital, with a nice stereo mic, so the sound quality is important. Any help is greatly appreciated.

[SVCDummy]

Try DVD2SVCD as a wrapper for TMPEnc. It integrates very well and the newer versions handle AVI source files.

Check it out in the tools section or at doom9.net

[mategal]

You could try beeesweet. It conversts anything to anything. Of course than you have to first save tha sound out from the avi, convert it with beesweet then mux back with the moeg in tmpeg. slower, but you can adjust anything ( rate, pitch, kHz......)

[mpb]

I'm currently using TMPGEnc PLUS to convert my home movies (DV avi format from firewire) to DVD-compliant mpgs, however no matter what I do the audio always sounds like garbage. I made sure to select 48khz/Stereo with 384kbps etc. but it still sounds like a 32kbps MP3 file. Is it just because TMPGEnc is very poor at converting audio? What program can I use or what can I do with TMPGEnc that will give me the same audio quality that I put in? My cam is a Sony DCR-TRV120 digital, with a nice stereo mic, so the sound quality is important. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Use toolame as the external encoder in your TMPGenc environmental settings. There's a guide on how to do this on this site. I'd tell you outright but I can't remember. I did this a while back and my audio on TMPGenc is AWESOME... and with no additional effort on my part from the way I was doing it before. Good luck!!

[Bondiablo]

I've always had good results using TMPGEnc's audio encoder but to try something else download the following programs which can be found from the Tools section, then in TMPGEnc go to Options> Environment settings > Audio engine, under each option choose External program and select toolame.exe for MPEG-1 Audio Layer II, lame.exe for MPEG-1 Audio Layer III and ssrc.exe for Sampling frequency convertor.

[ndaher]

Bondiablo, I've found Lame and Toolame, but what program do you mean by "ssrc.exe"? I can't seem to find anything in the tools section with that abbreviation. Thanks again everyone

[Bondiablo]

I thought they had it in there somewhere. Maybe it was on the BeSweet site. Anyway, here's the homepage.

http://shibatch.sourceforge.net/

[SVCDummy]

Well...

DVD2SVCD is an integrated set of tools that include the BEST of all of the freeware tools avaiable. For your audio problems you will find the integratred BeSweet package takes care of it in a first class way.

You also don't have to handle all the file crap manually. Just click a few setup points in the DVD2SVCD GUI wrapper and you off and running without having to sit there and wait for one event to finish before starting the next transcoding process.

Seriously, go give it a read at doom9.net

[troyvcd1]

can you use dvd2svcd to make dvd compliant mpgs.??

[EddyH]

I used to think that TMPGEnc's encoder was quite nasty but recent it'll-have-to-do-cuz-its-fast used with a decent source has changed my mind.. must have only had really ratty sources before. It still won't go above 16khz response, even at 224k with a sourcefile that goes up to 20khz, but the fidelity is perfectly fine otherwise and even the sample rate conversion 48 -> 44khz seemed to go ok.

If it's still sounding like ass at 384kbit, either somethings badly wrong, you have treble-sensitive ears like mine and are exaggerating because everything over 15.5khz is a dead loss, or maybe... have you set the layer and psychoacoustic models wrong?

I dunno, but playing with them before, i've yet to find an encoder where MUSICAM pyschoacoustics (type 1? 2?) didn't end up sounding like an AM radio and a badly compressed one at that. :/

If it's good quality you're after (and i'll keep saying this), hunt down a copy of CoolEdit96 somewhere with the GNU mp2 encoder. It's slow as molasses (still, gets 2x realtime at least on my 850mhz) but gives excellent results; 224kbit/s is hard to tell apart, and 384kbit/s should be totally indistinguishable from CD, though you may want to give it a mild treble *reduction* filter before encoding. Say 100% at 0hz to somewhere between 50 and 75% (linear) at the top of the band. It gets about 18khz response from 128k JS on up (sounds better with a filter at that rate tho, otherwise it overcompresses) and 20-21khz from 192k Sep.Stereo upwards, with increasing treble fidelity... and overpowerment.
Oh, and remember to cut anything you're processing into 40 minute chunks until you're ready to open-append it all and save the final mpg, to work around the 2gb memory bug.
All else are icky quality hares before it's tortoise-like prowess.

[alenhard]

for what it's worth, I'll throw in my two cents....

As already mentioned, use external audio tools. SSRC and Toolame. You'll be glad you did. They give excellent results.

Another nice little audio tool is Cdex. I think there's a link to it somewhere on here. Not only is it an excellent, super-fast cd ripper, but it does many convenient audio conversions in an easy-to-use GUI. Check it out!

[Dubber]

Just make sure that Options>Environmental_Settings>Audio_Engine>Sampli ng_Frequency_Convertor IS set for High Quality otherwise you may have bad sounding files...

[ndaher]

You guys are da man! Audio quality is exactly like what I put in. Now, if someone would be so kind as to direct me to some info as to what to do with these files. TMPGEnc created an .m2v file instead of an .mpg. What is that? And it also created a seperate .wav file for the audio. None of the "how to"s on this site addressed this kind of issue. Thanks again everyone!

[ChrissyBoy]

Now that you have decent audio you need to think about authoring to DVD. However you need that wav to be a 48Khz mpeg-audio (mpg 1 layer II) or AC-3. The former you can do in TMPEGEnc, the latter in BeSweet. Then you can use the elementry streams (.m2v [video] & .m2a/.mpa[audio]) as sources for your dvd authoring package. Some cheaper packages require the input to be program streams (video & audio together) and so you would use something like TMPEGEnc Mpeg Tools to multiplex the video & audio streams first.

CB

[Bondiablo]

*.m2v is your video stream and obviously the *.wav file is your audio. you can use the *.wav file as your audio for authoring DVDs but that will signinficanlty reduce the play time you can get on a disc because the wav file is so large. it would probably be best to convert that to either mp2 or ac3 with something like BeSweet.

Also, you can still get a single mpg or get TMPGEnc to produce a m2v and a mp2 file instead of a wav file if you want, even when using external audio tools. If you want a single mpg, set the stream type to System (video+audio) instead of ES (video+audio). If you want mp2 instead of wav go to Setting > Audio and for stream type choose MPEG-1 Audio Layer II instead of Linear PCM.

Oh, and you can always make a mpg file from seperate video and audio files by going to TMPGEnc > File > MPEG Tools and doing a simple multiplex.