[Banshee-List] Do you use lame VBR/ABR? Would you?

["Dave Steinberg" <dmsteinberg gmail com>]

Hi all,

I've been watching/playing with Banshee for a couple of years now, and
I think I'm going to really start using it.  All in all, it's an
impressive piece of software.  But, in the past, I've held back
because of a few outstanding problems, most notably, what I think was
very strange behaviour with lame VBR encoding.  All of the other
problems that really concerned me seem to have been fixed, and it
looks like a solution for this one is at hand, too.

I searched the mailing list for any mention of my issue and come up
empty.  I found one bug about it, which I've been commenting on:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=482776

The issue is that it's impossible to get the bitrate to go above 160
kb/s, regardless of the quality chosen, which makes the upper VBR
settings useless.  As for ABR, it asks the user to choose a quality
(which is ignored by lame) instead of a bitrate, resulting in the
default value always being used.  All the details are in the bug,
along with an improved mp3-lame.xml file that I have found fixes the
problems.

The purpose, then, of this message is two-fold. First, I'm just
wondering: does no one bother using lame VBR encoding in Banshee?  I
know there are plenty of alternatives, but my impression was that VBR
MP3 is a pretty popular choice.  Maybe not among Banshee users?  Or do
they use a low quality setting?  Or do they use a higher setting and
just not notice/care that it doesn't work?  Same kind of question for
ABR: does anyone use it in its current form?  Moreover, if ABR/VBR
worked properly, would people use it?

Second, I'm hoping to get some attention on the bug.  As I said, I
think I've got a solution there, so it would be nice to see it go back
into Banshee.

Thanks,
Dave