It is from 0 to 10. Quality 0 is 64kbps. Anything over 4 (128kbps) is close to CD Quality.
Looks like you are interesting in OGG...
I was too....
But always remember to go with compatiblity. People go for OGG, as they are anti-MS, sometimes they are pro-opensource. OGG is good, performs better like WMA, than MP3 at the same bitrate. But this is important only on lower bitrates.
At higher bitrates like 256kbps, all perform almost the same (but there are people who can still say the differnce between the format). And this bitrates (anything over 128kbps) are what we should enocode to ensure we got the most closet quality to CD Audio. Most of us are using these formats for local playback. So the filesize should not be something to consider. Go for the best audio format which could preserve the most audio data at a given bitrate.
I did some experiments with OGG, by East CD-DA Extractor 5.06. Ogg Vorbis 1.0 has VBR (Variable Bit Rate) and ABR (Average Bit Rate). Its encoding speed is considerably slow, showing that it needs more time to "intelligently think" to achieve the highest quality...
If you are a WinAmp user, you should get no worries, as you can simply download a Ogg plug-in for WinAmp. (Search Google).
I felt Ogg Vorbis holds good amount of data for both bass and treble sounds. You can notice that from the spectrum bar, when playing the song.
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Now let I be little biased and off-topic here
:
(The following are the rest of my experiments after Ogg Vorbis)
If I or someone says WMA9 64k = MP3 128k, that's wholly untrue. Honestly, I am a pro-MS, but I just recently realised WMA9 cuts out more treble data of a song, than the MP3 do. But this is with WMA9. I have thousands of songs encoded in WMA8 64k format, and all those sounds nice to
me. And after WMA9 was released, I began encoding with it. Personally, I like treble more than bass, so I enjoyed WMA8 better than MP3. But this time with WMA9, things have changed.
WMA9 128k was way better than MP3 128k (obviously it should, if M$ is trying point out WMA9 64k is same as MP3 128k)
I couldn't try WMA9 256k (as there is no such a bitrate to encode). But:
MP3 256k was better than WMA9 192k as it held more data in the far right side of treble. (This was bit unfair to WMA9 as the bitrate wasn't equal. But on the other hand, it is okay, cos M$ says WMA9 64k = MP3 128k)
After so many combinations of bitrates with file formats: Ogg Vorbis 1.0, Fraunhofer MP3, LAME 3.93.1 encodeced MP3, WMA9, I decided to go with MP3 256kbps with MusicMatch JukeBox 7.5, after considering the quality, compatibility and easy-for-use. But things didn't go the way I wanted to. Musicmatch Jukebox made glitches while playing MP3 while too many processes were running, which never happened to me with Windows Media Player before. So I am back to WMA9 finally...but this time, the bitrate should be reconsidered. As I heard the difference between a 64k and a 128k of WMA, I will not go back to 64k. Possibly 128k
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But this important: if any one feels someother codec is better than MP3, then stick with it! That's why I stucked with WMA8 for a long time. MP3 is a 7 year old codec. Any codec which is born after that should be techically better than MP3, as they are built after the experiences by MP3, and better and improved coding.
Hybrid Mode
