User manual

Encoding quality: The quality of the psycho-
acoustic model with Nero is excellent. Naturally, a
compromise needs to be found between the
complexity of the model and the computing time
needed. Depending on the intended application of
the MP3 file, the quality of the encoding (i.e. of the
acoustic model) can be set at 'fast', 'medium' and
'highest'. With the highest quality, encoding takes
place at approx. normal speed on a PII350, i.e. three
minutes of music will be encoded in three minutes.
At the 'fast' setting (and with the same hardware),
encoding can take place at up to eight times the
normal speed. The sound quality is already very
good with the 'fast' setting and completely
satisfactory for most applications.
Bitrate: 'Bitrate' means the number of bits stored
per second in the MP3 file. The higher this is, the
smaller the amount of information that has to be
removed from the original sound file. Therefore the
higher the bitrate, the better the sound quality. Of
course, the price paid for this sound quality is a
larger file. The MP3 file format lets you encode at
either a constant or a variable bitrate (VBR). Select
the option you prefer and specify the bitrate.
Constant bitrate: A bitrate of 128 KB per second
has proved itself to be a fairly good compromise
between sound quality and file size. At this bitrate,
audio files, very roughly speaking, are compressed
by somewhat more than a factor of 10. This means
that a normal track of around three to four minutes in
length (in CD quality; in other words 44.1 kHz, 16
Bit, stereo) can be compressed to a 3 - 4 megabyte
MP3 file by these means.
Once you are satisfied with the settings, click on the
'OK' button to close the dialog or make additional
alterations to the expert settings.