I use 192 for most stuff, and 256 for all my vinyl rips. Oh, and I keep all my vinyl rips on CDR's as wav's, in case I ever need them down the road. To me...320 is a waste of space. You should be fine with 192 and 256.

there was a big ole thread about this a while ago...

word...any keywords?

scratchlive.net Here is one, just do a search for "MP3 Quality" or something along those lines.

I'm all over that thread, wow.

thanks julls! congrats on the baby!

Thanks bro, no problem!

damn that thread is long...but im gonna take your advice julls and do a 256 on my recorded vinyl instead of 320 and then just do a 192 on my mp3s

I use 192kbps VBR for pretty much everything... For archival of vinyl, etc I'm tempted to use 192kbps vbr for gigs, but keep a copy as FLAC, APE, or WMA lossless for permanent archive 'just in case'.

Oh, I forgot to say that I use CBR for everything.

okay so what do you think i shoudl set my settings for itunes then?
right now i have
stereo bit rate as 192kbps
using vbr at the highest quality
sample rate at 44.1khz
channels auto
stereo mode at joint
using smart encoding
and filtering frequencies......and its stil producint quite a big file and importing at 240kbps not 192

Everything sounds fine to me, the only thing is if you use VBR your lows will hit at like 320kbps and your highs might hit at like 128kbps. Something like that, you understand what i'm saying? The advantage with using VBR is that if you have a 320 mp3, say it takes up like 8megs, and then if you have the same file as CBR it would take up 10megs. I'm not sure if i'm comming accross clear or not. I'm not too good at explaining techy stuff. But needless to say, I use CBR so that everything hits at the same bitrate, and that I know i'll never have any problems with players/software in the future with having a problem with reading VBR.

that was like japanese to me but i just used a preset itunes import thing and its importing at 192kpbs

Haha, sorry. Maybe someone else can explain it better for you.

naw its cool meng its a complicated subject but im just gonna go with what itunes has im pretty sure it cant be all that jacked up

Given idential bit rates, VBR files will offer a smaller file size with a higher overall quality. It varies the sampling rate based on the musical 'information' that's presented. During the 'solo' or 'breakdown' they drop the sampling rate because there's less information. During the song or chorus they increase the bitrate to handle the additional information.

Here's where things get interesting though. VBR has a limit on the 'base' bitrate and it can't be set to 320kbps. Most software limits VBR files to 256kbps so a 320kbps MP3 CBR will be higher quality than the 256kbps VBR file.

Basically, think of it like this... VBR is better than CBR at identical bitrates provided your equipment will support it. The only real drawback of VBR is that both Mac OS X and Windows XP report the length of the track incorrectly because they're VBR.

BTW, most of the new and better codecs use VBR.

huh...i was quite surprized how good mp3s sound on a loud >1kwatt system

I noticed when I converted a few songs with VBR, some of the vocals aren't consistant. In the end, I stuck with using wav files and an external.