VBR is exactly that — 320 when it needs to be, 16 during silent passages and everything in between. There's no 320 VBR, 128 VBR or anything in between, only VBR. TwistedWave greys out the window when VBR is selected but really should clear it. VBR can take longer to convert but I don't notice much difference.James Steele wrote: ↑Mon Jan 29, 2024 7:21 pmYeah I guess I’m dense. So what you’re saying is that people don’t hear the difference between a 320 variable bit rate file or a 320 constant bit rate file?mikehalloran wrote:
Depending on the complexity of the source, there may be little difference in the file size between 320 CBR and VBR. It's generally acknowledged that VBR sounds better than 256 and the armchair expert boards usually have a few posting "I can't hear the difference but 320 is better…" and the like. It's a much bigger issue with AV where the streaming services including YouTube are doing VBR only. Here's the AT&T Developer paper on video VBR streaming: https://developer.att.com/video-optimiz ... streaming.
Back to audio. For kicks, I took Revolution 9 off the 2018 White Album remaster CD and bounced it to different formats in TwistedWave:
44.1/16 — 88.4 MB
VBR — 17.7 MB
320 CBR — 21MB
256 CBR — 16.8 MB (the audio on my 256GB iPod 7)
128 CBR — 8.4 MB (the audio on my 2MB iPod Shuffle)
m4a Apple MPEG-4 audio (lossless) — 52.3 MB (the audio on my 1TB iPhone 15 Pro Max)