In the Selection Assistant one can click Keep for highest bitrate. What is unclear about it is does it treat VBR and CBR differently. You see the problem is VBR encoded will have an average bitrate noted, but as often as not the quality is superior with an average of odd values like 167 or 153 than a constant of 192, and could even be as good as 320.
Yes it's possible to choose by filesize, but then what if the filesize is smaller because it's actually lower quality not because of the superior compression.
You've posted that the new version 1.4 has support for additional audio formats. Surely then you've considered the problem of supposed lower bitrate average actually being higher quality because of VBR versus CBR.
Some people will want to keep the CBR encoded ones despite their larger size, but mostly I would imagine people will want to keep the VBR ones because of their smaller size.
Perhaps the encoding should be a column that shows.
The "keep highest bitrate" button in the Selection Assistant could be improved to give options to give preference to VBR of higher "EQUIVALENT" qualities, e.g. just because a VBR has lower average bitrate does not mean it is lower than some constant bitrate ones.
As you may know, that could get a little tricky. If you just gave an option to arbitrarily always pick VBR as if always higher than CBR, if something is encoded VBR but at very low quality that would be no good.
Perhaps give people the option to choose a) highest bitrate regardless, or b) preference to VBR of higher quality, with each quality value (1-10) being understood to be considered better than some equivalent fixed bitrate
Suggest VARIABLE Bitrate v CBR preference to Keep
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DV
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ohcanada_techguy
Terrific.
You follow what I mean about VBR avg bitrate 159 being conceivably better than CBR 320? Pretty tricky. Is why I thought perhaps a reference table in options to decide.
Since Duplicate Cleaner handles MP3, M4A, M4P, WMA, FLAC, OGG, APE, etc., how does the program currently behave as far as considering a group of a mix of these with say same artist song album, I assume it shows these as duplicates, do we know if keep highest completely skips these because their different types? So now the issue is how to choose between them, an I imagine FLAC, MP4 etc also have VBR and average bitrate and quality settings in the tag/headers, so if you implement the lookup/reference comparison weight table options idea, the rules/lookup could decide which is better?
You follow what I mean about VBR avg bitrate 159 being conceivably better than CBR 320? Pretty tricky. Is why I thought perhaps a reference table in options to decide.
Since Duplicate Cleaner handles MP3, M4A, M4P, WMA, FLAC, OGG, APE, etc., how does the program currently behave as far as considering a group of a mix of these with say same artist song album, I assume it shows these as duplicates, do we know if keep highest completely skips these because their different types? So now the issue is how to choose between them, an I imagine FLAC, MP4 etc also have VBR and average bitrate and quality settings in the tag/headers, so if you implement the lookup/reference comparison weight table options idea, the rules/lookup could decide which is better?