MP3 VBR and CBR Question

[Master Yoda]

A quick question, why are people ripping mp3s to vbr now rather thatn cbr ?? as i always rip cds, or vinyl to cbr 192 down to the fact everywhere says 192 is cd quality ??

[KpeX]

VBR is higher quality than CBR at any bitrate, since it intelligently assigns lower and higher bitrates as needed by the differences in the sound signal. Theoreitcally speaking, MP3 is not CD quality at any bitrate.

[LnxPeng]

If you switch to abr 192 (which is a happy compromise between vbr and cbr) you might be amazed at the quality hike. If you have the ability to watch LAME output, some of the frames will be as low as 32 kbps if it is a simple frame. Then some of the frames will reach 320 kbps, giving it a higher quality overall. The only benefit to CBR is decoder complexity, and now that is almost never an issue.

[Slogra]

You might wanna compare it to and CBR video and VBR video.
CBR video will only look good in low action scenes, but it will look absolutely horrible at high action scenes, there will be large block all over the place.
Now with VBR video it can shave off some bits from the low action scenes and use those at high action scenes. So both will look good.

192kbps CBR mp3 is just not efficient and it sounds not as good as VBR mp3.

So use Lame --alt-preset standard (very, very high quality)
or Lame --alt-preset medium (good quality, probably better than 192kbps CBR and smaller too. This one only works in newer version of Lame).

You also might wanna check KpeX's link in his signature.

[ukb007]

VBR is always better than CBR. Period.

Regards.