I am currently contemplating the possibility of recoding all my CDs into new compressed formats. I currently use MP3 but since I started my collection in a time when a huge hard drive was 4GB, a lot of those are coded at 96 and 112 kilobits/s… which doesn’t sound all that great. Although MP3 isn’t the greatest format around, it does offer the advantage of being compatible with nearly all players around, something neither FLAC nor Ogg Vorbis can claim.
Some of the most recent devices support the addition of codecs, but not all. My Sansa player doesn’t, although I could probably upgrade the firmware or something but my car built-in player is another story. So for the time being, I considered recoding everything in MP3 with a higher bit-rate, or maybe use FLAC and write some kind of script that transcode the files to MP3 for exporting to a player. I’m not decided yet. But let say I decide to stick with MP3 all the way. What bit-rate should I use?
Posted by Steven Pigeon 
