How to convert wav to ogg and mp3 using VBR

Question

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?

Answer 1

For MP3, I strongly suggest using Lame , considered by many (including me) THE best MP3 encoder, specially for VBR.

sudo apt-get install lame

And to encode:

lame -V 5 file.wav file.mp3

This will create a high-quality MP3 VBR file around ~130kbps, which is great for casual listening. Use -V 3 for average bitrates around ~200kbps

If you want to create id3v1 and id3v2 tags at the same time, you can use:

lame -V 5 --add-id3v2 --pad-id3v2 --ignore-tag-errors --ta artist --tl album --tt title --tn track --ty year --tg genre --tc comment file.wav file.mp3

For OGG, the most traditional encoder is Vorbis

sudo apt-get install vorbis-tools

And to encode:

oggenc -q 3 -o file.ogg file.wav

Ogg is VBR by default. -q 3 stands 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.ogg it 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:

oggenc -a artist -t title -l album -G genre -c comment -o file.ogg file.wav

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

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And, for GUI, you said it yourself: soundconverter is a great choice. It does have VBR for MP3 (for OGG, its the format's default, so don't worry).