ORIGINAL: joseph.barron
I finally broke down and paid the 19.95 to unlock the LAME encoder. I've been doing a PODCast for a clients project, we talk about the music as it is developed and recorded, and tried to use the LAME encoder. It had sooooooooooooo many artifacts, it was seriously painful to listen to. Unless I encode at 16bit, 128K, it sucked.
I went back to sound forge, which sounds better than the LAME encoder at its highest, at 64 bit. Blows it away at 80. What am I doing wrong or is there another encoder available from Cakewalk for S5 PE?
If I understand what you are saying, you are confused. The higher the kbps("bits") the better the sound quality. The tradeoff is that the files are larger with increased kbps. 64 bit is the lowest, not the highest.
I have a couple thousand compact disks, and I decided to rip my entire library. So I spent a fair amount of time figuring this out. Using modern encoders, you might get by at 128, but at 192 you will be very satisfied with the result. Anything less, like 80 is for crude requirements like spoken word. Microsoft even has examples of this on their website.
Yahoo music is distributed at 192. Don't know about Itunes.
MP3 and WMA are more ore less competitive. I ended up using WMA because it is built into Windows Media Player, and I figured it would become a standard like everything else Microsoft.
There is an interesting setting in in Media Player that allows lossless compression with about a 50% file size savings over a Wav file.