AfterDawn: News

One fundamental problem in commercial online music distribution has been that the quality of the product, meaning the sound quality of the music, has been significantly worse than on CDs or in illegally distributed copies. Many online music stores have used too low bitrate for their audio encoding (for example 128kbps MP3 files), which does not satisfy many of the consumers.

LAME is a free MP3 encoder and it’s strongest side are the highly optimized VBR (Variable BitRate) modes, that offer virtually 'CD-quality' sound, with decently sized files. Most development work and tuning for the LAME and it’s settings takes place at the Hydrogenaudio.org community, where the VBR encoding settings for LAME have been tuned to the max.



EMusic.com is now the first(?) commercial party to recognize the high quality of the LAME MP3 encoder and it’s VBR routines. EMusic has now announced that they will be using LAME 3.92 with the VBR setting ‘standard’ in order to deliver high quality for their customers.

In response to the MANY requests from subscribers, we have increased the bit rate of our MP3s from 128 KBPS to a high-quality Variable Bit Rate (VBR). For those of you not familiar with the "ins and outs" of encoding, this means that the sound quality of our tracks has improved dramatically. I feel comfortable saying that there is no other music subscription service offering anything close to EMusic's sound quality.
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To encode the files on Emusic, we used LAME version 3.92. The import option that was used is -alt-preset standard.

Emusic.com

Written by: Lasse Penttinen @ 2 May 2003 8:48