>As to bitrate, I seem to recall going lower than 128 on some earlier
>tests (by "earlier" I mean several years ago) and finding that the
>result sounded rather shite, but it's not really a technology I'm
>conversant with the in-and-out details of, so it's entirely possible I
>had some other setting wrong at the time.
Well, I did notice that some of the previous recordings had different sample rates - e.g. most of the first chapter of _The Iron Age_ is sampled at 22050 Hz, which is rather low (thus making a high bitrate even more of an overkill).
>IIRC, I ended up going with
>the rate I did because it's identified as "CD quality" in the pulldown
>menu, and I figured that was pretty good.
It is. At 128 kb/s you'd have to be a trained sound technician, listening on high-end studio equipment to be able to tell any difference from the uncompressed original. Which is why, unless the original recording was created on professional, high-end studio equipment, 128 kb/s is usually more that is needed.
>>Just out of curiosity, what software do you use for capturing,
>>post-processing and encoding?
>
>Lately, NCH WavePad. Its main pros as
>I saw them last time I was looking around were that a) there's a free
>version and b) it's not full of abstruse command-liney weirdness like
>a lot of free software.
Heh, yeah. I'll have to check it out and see what options are available for MP3 encoding in that program. For example, if it has the ability to encode at an average bitrate, rather than a constant one, you can squeeze more quality into a smaller file.
>I didn't want to have to learn calculus just
>to record some MP3s, although one of these days I'll have to see if I
>can get it (or something) to
>ring modulate.
Heheheh! I've been looking into that myself, though I haven't actually tried it yet. There's a ring modulator plugin for the popular freeware audio program Audacity, and even some tutorials on the web on how to achieve decent Dalek voice effects with it.