Posted 04/20/2007 at 10:01:51pm

I started converting my 500+ CD collection back in 1998 with L.A.M.E., way before most of the iPod punks ever heard of MP3 or any compressed audio. I had a necessity to do it because it was a major hassel to haul hundreds of CD's to DJ parties. Back in those days when you couldn't buy 100's of GB hard drives for next to nothing so I had to experiment with what was reasonable. Even 9 years ago, I knew that 128Kbps CBR (constant bit rate) MP3 didn't sound good enough. I really wanted to use 320Kbps, but hard drives weren't large enough to hold my entire collection at that rate, so I used the next best thing of VBR (variable bit rate), over time I re-ripped my collection multiple times, and years ago finally said enough is enough, and just went to 320Kbps CBR MP3. I have tried some comparison tests of my own over the years, and come to the conclusion that if I picked a lower bit rate, it might sound ok for a lot of my songs, but eventually I would find a song that didn't sound very good. The solution was to just encode everything at the highest bit rate of 320Kbps and just not worry about the storage that it used. Now that I can buy 1TB drives, even 320Kbps isn't a big deal, heck I could rip everything as WAV files and still not fill a 1TB drive. Audio tests are hard to do, but I can tell you for a fact when I hear a really badly encoded song off the internet, oh my it hurts to hear it. Good examples of songs to find for the tests are ones that have: cymbols, snare drums, anything that rings, anything that has very high frequencies, anything that has stereo movement of sound, wide dynamics of volume in a short amount of time. When I listen to the music and not trying to do a test, sometimes I hear weird encoding problems and they are usually associated with those types of sound.