How to convert wav to ogg and to mp3 with VBR and excellent end quality?
If possible, using soundconverter or ffmpeg.
Incidentally, I tried to see whether soundconverter uses VBR and there is nothing about it in the GUI preferences, so it is not clear. Does it?
For MP3, I strongly suggest using Lame
, considered by many (including me) THE best MP3 encoder, specially for VBR:
And to encode:
This will create a high-quality MP3 VBR file around ~130kbps, which is great for casual listening. Use
-V 3for average bitrates around ~200kbps.If you want to create id3v1 and id3v2 tags at the same time, you can use:
For Ogg, the most traditional encoder is Vorbis
:
And to encode:
Ogg is VBR by default.
-q 3stands for default quality, you may change 3 from -1 to 10, or omit the option. Also, output file is optional. If you omit-o file.oggit will automatically create a file with same name as input and .ogg extension. It also supports multiple input files (you can encode several at once, for example, using *.wav).And for tagging:
Last but not least, since you seem to be very interested in encoding, an amazing forum for audio technical details and awesome source of knowledge is HydrogenAudio.
And, for GUI, you said it yourself:
soundconverteris a great choice. It does have VBR for MP3 (for Ogg, its the format's default, so don't worry).For Variable bitrate in OGG format, transform it with ffmpeg which is avconv on Ubuntu (see here for difference)
Quality for qscale option
Which one to choose
My tests results are followings
Results of testings from a flac file
From a recording of an album I think is a reference in term of recording and mastering quality, preceding digits are the qscale values, sizeof file and resulting bitrate