I used the first 45 seconds 'Dancing With The Moonlit Knight' by Genesis and I felt like I was hearing artifacts in some higher-pitched vocal frequencies. I used a sampling track and I caught something. Set to VBR level 2, Joint Stereo, set overall quality to high (-q2) and was on my way. And I can use it right on my MacBook so I can keep encoding when I am away at school. It's very fast: I can complete one album in a minute. So I re-ripped yet again and started using this. I soon found a program for my MacBook, XLD, which can both split the cue sheets AND encode to VBR using Lame 3.99.5. Took about 20 minutes to rip and encode 4 albums. I started my re-ripping on the family PC using WinLAME 3.98, copying everything to my flash drive to the computer. So my process is ripping to FLAC and a cue sheet, backing them up, and then encoding them to the mp3 bit rate.

I have decided to bump it up to LAME V2 (roughly 190 kbps per song). I used to use 128 kbps joint stereo and CBR. I have just recently started re-ripping and re-encoding my collection to a higher bit rate.

Xld mp3 encoder