Most quality-to-size effective bitrate

[D_4_Dog]

it would probably depend on your gear as well. As you scale up you'll probably start to find eg lame -v4 unexceptable so IMHO that "sweet spot" will keep changing as long as you keep upgrading your gear. Why don't u get an external HD, rip lossless, and rid yourself of this problem once 'n for all?

 

[Nospam]

I used to rip everything to 160 AAC, until I started noticing slight imperfections in a small number of songs. Not wanting to spend hours upon hours trying to find the "perfect" encoding rate, I simply ripped everything to 320 AAC. Yes, it takes up a lot of space, and I'm certain I wouldn't be able to tell the difference vs 256 or even 192, but psychologically, I now no longer worry about "should I re-rip this song at a higher bitrate?"

The nice thing about having all my CDs in ALAC, is I can always re-encode at any bitrate with a few mouse clicks. Being the lazy SOB I am, I'd rather just buy a new iPod with a larger hard drive

 

[VolcanoDiver]

I always encode at LAME V0, it works very well.

 

[ShadowVlican]

Quote:

Originally Posted by pedxing /img/forum/go_quote.gif I usually use between -V4 and -V2, depending on the music and quality of recording.

+1

can't hear the difference on the move (and on my shuffle) anyways.. so might as well fit more tunes!

 

[dizzyorange]

r3mix setting on LAME - its 96 - 224 -q2 vbr plus some other optimized settings by some guy who spent forever doing A/BX tests on some very nice gear.