I appreciate that -q is supposed to work with -m and -M now. It works on most files. Here is a pathological case that doesn't: a 30 second sine wave in stereo. Using libVorbis v1.1.1, $ oggenc -q3 -m 96 sinewav.wav Enabling bitrate management engine Opening with wav module: WAV file reader Encoding "sinewav.wav" to "sinewav.ogg" at quality level 3.00 using constrained VBR (min 96 kbps, no max) Failed to set bitrate min/max in quality mode (It does not encode the file) The hard limit encodes, but fails to set the limit: $ oggenc -q3 --managed --advanced-encode-option bitrate_hard_min=96 sinewav.wav Enabling bitrate management engine Opening with wav module: WAV file reader Encoding "sinewav.wav" to "sinewav.ogg" at quality level 3.00 using constrained VBR (no min or max) Setting advanced encoder option "bitrate_hard_min" to 96 Failed to set advanced rate management parameters [ 99.2%] [ 0m00s remaining] \ Done encoding file "sinewav.ogg" File length: 0m 30.0s Elapsed time: 0m 01.8s Rate: 16.3755 Average bitrate: 13.3 kb/s I'm happy to send a link (in private) to the .wav file. Nic Watson