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| <H1>CBR/ABR/VBR: the 3 encoding modes</H1> |
| <p> </p> |
| <p>LAME is able to encode your music using one of its 3 encoding modes: constant |
| bitrate (CBR), average bitrate (ABR) and variable bitrate (VBR).<br> |
| <br> |
| <br> |
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| <h2>Constant Bitrate (CBR)</h2> |
| <p>This is the default encoding mode, and also the most basic. In this mode, the |
| bitrate will be the same for the whole file. It means that each part of your |
| mp3 file will be using the same number of bits. The musical passage beeing a |
| difficult one to encode or an easy one, the encoder will use the same bitrate, |
| so the quality of your mp3 is variable. Complex parts will be of a lower quality |
| than the easiest ones. The main advantage is that the final files size won't |
| change and can be accurately predicted.<br> |
| <br> |
| </p> |
| <h2>Average Bitrate (ABR)</h2> |
| <p>In this mode, you choose a target bitrate and the encoder will try to constantly |
| maintain an average bitrate while using higher bitrates for the parts of your |
| music that need more bits. The result will be of higher quality than CBR encoding |
| while the average file size will remain predictible, so this mode is highly |
| recommended over CBR.<br> |
| <br> |
| </p> |
| <h2>Variable bitrate (VBR)</h2> |
| <p>In this mode, you choose the desired quality on a scale going from 9 (lowest |
| quality/highest distortion) to 0 (highest quality/lowest distortion). Then encoder |
| tries to maintain the given quality in the whole file by choosing the optimal |
| number of bits to spend for each part of your music. The main advantage is that |
| you are able to specify the quality level that you want to reach, but the inconvenient |
| is that the final file size is totally unpredictible.</p> |
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