LACE oddity

[Dave Labrecque]

Has anyone noticed that using the joint stereo setting in LACE (LAME codec) lowers the sample rate from 44.1 to 32 KHz? What's up with that?

I tried the same conversion with dBPoweramp, and it worked fine, keeping the SR at 44.1. LAME codec again. Go figure.

If it matters, these were both done at 80 Kbps at the highest quality setting available.

Anyway -- you have been warned.

[Carl G.]

Has anyone noticed that using the joint stereo setting in LACE (LAME codec) lowers the sample rate from 44.1 to 32 KHz? What's up with that?

I tried the same conversion with dBPoweramp, and it worked fine, keeping the SR at 44.1. LAME codec again. Go figure.

If it matters, these were both done at 80 Kbps at the highest quality setting available.

Anyway -- you have been warned.

Amazing. I also notice that the same effect happens with LAME in all Channel Modes, and in all Quality Modes (even at 80kbps).
I have Ogg Vorbis and Blade also available through LACE. And Both Ogg and Blade do the same thing!!
So, maybe it's a LACE issue - not a LAME issue?? (no pun intended)

[jmh]

Don't know if there is development is going into ogg. Xiph merged it with silk as opus. This appears to be among or the best compression codec out there now for music.

Going back to lame, thanks for the warning. I think lace was a particular windows port. Maybe the guys who did it needed it for something specific. I was using lace for a while to post telephone recordings as mp3s as a homework-hotline webpage. I remember having to play with the parameters quite a bit for 8khs mono - and then I realized many of the computers of the day (or at least the decoders) would not even play back the audio at that sample rate. It was before speex and mp3s did a pretty mediocre job on speech so what I settled on was not a very impressive compression rate over the original ulaw files.

[Dave Labrecque]

Don't know if there is development is going into ogg. Xiph merged it with silk as opus. This appears to be among or the best compression codec out there now for music.

Going back to lame, thanks for the warning. I think lace was a particular windows port. Maybe the guys who did it needed it for something specific. I was using lace for a while to post telephone recordings as mp3s as a homework-hotline webpage. I remember having to play with the parameters quite a bit for 8khs mono - and then I realized many of the computers of the day (or at least the decoders) would not even play back the audio at that sample rate. It was before speex and mp3s did a pretty mediocre job on speech so what I settled on was not a very impressive compression rate over the original ulaw files.

Jon Marshall Smith created LACE (https://www.jms-audioware.com/). I think it was just intended as a way to get MP3s out of SAWStudio. This appears to be a bug that was never caught. I don't think Jon's done any work on his JMS Audioware plugins in over a decade.

[TotalSonic]

Frankly at this point LACE seems like an obsolete tool, and given cpu speed and hard drive space of current PC's, it's just more efficient work flow to render out wav files from SAW, and then use the batch converter of your choice to reliably convert them to whatever delivery format you need. I highly recommend Awave Audio for this chore - it reads about 90 formats and exports to around 60 of them, and has excellent sample rate conversion as an option within it as well. It's price has been reduced to all of $23 these days too - https://fmjsoft.com/awaveaudio.html#main

Best regards,
Steve Berson

[Dave Labrecque]

Frankly at this point LACE seems like an obsolete tool, and given cpu speed and hard drive space of current PC's, it's just more efficient work flow to render out wav files from SAW, and then use the batch converter of your choice to reliably convert them to whatever delivery format you need. I highly recommend Awave Audio for this chore - it reads about 90 formats and exports to around 60 of them, and has excellent sample rate conversion as an option within it as well. It's price has been reduced to all of $23 these days too - https://fmjsoft.com/awaveaudio.html#main

Best regards,
Steve Berson

Thanks for that reminder, Steve. The thing I was still finding useful about LACE is long renders. I do a lot of podcasts these days, which are anywhere from a half-hour to an hour in length. It's nice to have to wait for only one long render rather than two. Even if total render time ends up being about the same (and I don't know that it does), I have to remember to check that the first is finished before starting the second, which is an extra thing that slows down the process.

[jmh]

Jon Marshall Smith created LACE (https://www.jms-audioware.com/).

I was wondering if I was remembering the right name of the encoder after I posted that - then decided that it was not worth the cpu time. Thanks for the correction. Still if you look at many of these encoders, you find a bewildering number of parameters.

[jmh]

One more thing about opus is that it has one of the quicker encode times - although since I am kind of responding to Dave's podcast comment, it's usefulness there would depend on how widely it has been adopted in media players.