Doing this as guide for people wanting the best out of lossy since Noise/ambient/industrial Is stressful for these codecs, Well not so much for newer ones.
LAME 3.100 at V2
- Has the best VBR performance If Merzbow/pain jerk encoded It ~248 ~ 275kbps while Lustmord/Lull It 120 ~ 155kbps. Only The haters/Gero's need V0(Nothing to hear...nothing too) & V0 with allshort(Nikumu 2007) to fix smearing and pre echo.
- The only gripe is that I wish the VBR bitrate was the full 640kbps or that MAD decoder was more popular. Since adding more bits actually helps than 320kbps with bit reservoir faking 450 ~ 580kbps.
Apple AAC at Q91 -
- Smearing is very bad when set to --quality 2 with Aeoga - COAV II the intro sounds like when Sat TV is losing a signal, It takes --quality 1 to stop It but even then It still a issue. Meanwhile a lot of Noise albums suffer from added pops/clicks that need 320k abr to stop, Finally this encoder sucks ass with 3KHz synth tones I can't listen to Dracula Syndrome without the 8min mark on the first track choking. No idea how this encoder gotten a 4.9/5 at 192kbps VBR.
Ogg Vorbis at Q6 -
- Much better than AAC but the trade off here is that Vomir and The Rita need 280 ~ 450kbps to not suffer from loud puff sounds that just sounds so wrong. No wonder Spotify uses 320kbps Vorbis.
Musepack at Q5 -
- Pretty much 100% artifact free never found a sample that chokes It, When I tried dead body collection's - Trypanophobia the bit rate is 384kbps with no artifacts.
Opus at 192kbps -
- Same with Musepack but It a 4.9/5 instead of a 5/5, Cause dead body collection's - Trypanophobia needs to be manually set to 350kbps.