Comment 28 for bug 195483

@Christian Niemeyer: I believe vbr-mean-bitrate actually requests ABR encoding, which conflicts with vbr-quality=4, the switch that requests VBR encoding.

@tigerdog: Nyquist's theorem dictates that the lowpass frequency needs to be significantly lower than half of the bitrate (44100) to avoid aliasing artefacts (which can be quite severe). I believe standalone Lame internally sets the lowpass to 21000 when asked for CBR 320 (the highest quality available), to 19500 when given -V 0 (the highest VBR quality), and even lower for lower qualities. Anything higher than 21000 is considered unsafe with regard to aliasing.

@everyone: knowing just how many "internal" switches LAME has and how unskillfully the defaults are set in the gstreamer plugin, it is very unlikely to find a gstreamer command line that works as intended and will pass rigorous listening tests. The issues with the above command-lines perfectly illustrate my point. The only way to fix the problem is at code level, and posting command-lines will just distract from this.