[KappaWing]

Assume its played on a high-quality stereo.


Which one is the best quality/size value?

[Taristin]

I vote for 192. I personally cant tell the difference from that on up (usually, some songs are obvious) but I can tell a 128 when I hear it :/

[Mars]

Yeah... I can hear a very slight difference on most songs, but I either go 192 or lossless.

[Ulala]

192 or higher. 192 is my preferred.

[Fineus]

192 for me as well. It used to be 128 but I suddenly realised I could tell the difference. I can't past 192 so that affords me the best file size to quality compromise.

[Polpolion]

I have no idea what that means, so I just put the biggest number

[CP5670]

It depends a lot on the source audio. 128 is more than enough for some files (recordings of FM music from DOS games) while others still exhibit popping at 320 (lossless FS2 master files). I use oggs these days anyway, which generally sound slightly better.

[brozozo]

I use 192 kbps. I've never noticed a difference in bit rates, and anything higher than 192 just takes up too much space.

[NGTM-1R]

320.

I can indeed tell the difference between that and anything else.

[asyikarea51]

320. That, or WMA Lossless. I tend to crank the volume up on my cheapo headphones and I can tell a difference when there's too much bass and not enough bitrate... such is trance techno... or whatever you call it

[perihelion]

Freeyeow!  In this day and age, there's no excuse not to be using a variable bit rate encoder.  I mean, I don't use .mp3 anymore unless I absolutely have to, but if I must I demand VBR.  That's the only way to get rid of the swishy sound .mp3 always imparts to rapid high-freq percussion without ridiculous bitrates (like 256 kbps or higher, sheesh, thankyou, no).

Better still to just use .ogg.  There are a number of good portable players that support it out of the box.  For those that don't, there's the Rockbox mod.  I've found an .ogg with an average bitrate of around 130 to 140 kbps is more than good enough to fool my ears.

[castor]

"-V 3 --vbr-new" in LAME makes good enough job, IMO.

[Nuke]

i use 192. i dont care much for quality considering the music i listen to, gotta keep it kvlt you know

[KappaWing]

i use 192. i dont care much for quality considering the music i listen to, gotta keep it kvlt you know

56 kbps.... now THAT is kvlt!

Not like you can tell the difference in a Burzum song anyway.

[aldo_14]

192 - but I always buy CDs for HiFi use, anyways.

[Nuke]

i use 192. i dont care much for quality considering the music i listen to, gotta keep it kvlt you know

56 kbps.... now THAT is kvlt!

Not like you can tell the difference in a Burzum song anyway.

the noise must be perserved for prosperity

[Ford Prefect]

I use 128 for most stuff, and reserve 192 for my really nice CDs, especially choral music.

[Scuddie]

I use 128kb/s when I want to make my ears bleed.
I use 192kb/s for decent (but not great) quality for the benefit of storage.
I use 256kb/s most of the time, it's a good sweet spot between quality and file size.
I use 320kb/s for the highest fidelity and depth for compressed music.
I use 384kb/s for archiving purposes when FLAC isn't available.
I use FLAC for everything else.

[jr2]

VBR0 
I use Audiograbber + LAME to rip my CDs for storage.

[perihelion]

I'm really surprised at how many people here seem to still be using constant bit-rate compression schemes.  Those were outmoded over five years ago.  Even if you do have the hard-drive space to spare for huge music files, high (average) bit-rate files stand to benefit from a variable scheme that allows them to put the bits where they are needed most.  LAME does this very well, but so many people don't even seem to know the feature is there or that it really is worth using.

Again, I think everyone should just use Vorbis, but what else is new...