Duffinator said:
So what's "a sufficiently high bitrate"?
In my opinion, 192 kbps. On
some music there might be a tiny perceptible difference between 192 and 256, but for the most part there is none. I have seen and read alot of the research, dbt's, and forum discussions that WmAx mentions and that coupled with my own experience leads me to agree with him.
Not to stir up the hornet's nest, but I also believe there is very little difference between the 'good' encoders (ie NOT Xing and older encoders of that ilk). I often edit songs ripped from CD (fade-in/out, split or join tracks, etc) and so I use SoundForge for both editing and transcoding to mp3. I believe SF uses the Fraunhoffer encoder. I've compared its results to Lame and I really can't notice any difference, so I just stick with SF and its Fraunhoffer encoder.
Exact Audio Copy + LAME is almost an urban legend on the net as the only way to get bit perfect rips and transparent encoding. I beg to differ on that as well. I've compared EAC to SF and in all cases the rips from each were bit for bit identical. EAC+LAME is a fine way of doing things, but it's not the only way.