I have been doing this for a long time now and let me assure you... 320kbps (and above) is the way to go. With Hard drive and optical media becoming so cheap now (and prices still steadily declining) you should try and go with 320kbps. Exact Audio Copy is a nice program that does this very well. Yes, the codec and softwarer you use matters.
Personally, in the last year I have converted to WMA (quality 98) or max bitrate VBR. This yeilds and average 10MB song size BUT... the sound quality difference between MP3 320 and this is quite large. WMA 98 currently has the edge. It comes really close to an Audio CD.
On a good system you can clearly hear the difference. As for the 128 kbps fans, c'mon... you can hear the difference between a 128 mp3 and a 320 mp3 on a cellphones mp3 ringtone.
__________________
Playing in my CD player: Rod Stewart - The Story So Far |