Theres been a lot of talk on Live365's community discussion boards about
Mp3Pro
which is supposed to give better sound quality for lower bitrates. About 50
stations are already using it (but you have to use Winamp with the Mp3pro
plug-in). It does make a huge differance compared to regular Mp3 (more high
end). If I ever get the time I may change my 24k stations over to it - but
with
1400+ songs its going to take awhile.  

Right now I've been re-encoding two of my stations (Jangle Radio and Jangle
Radio Classic) for 56K modems using Lame (using a front-end called Lamer), and
been getting good comments about the sound quality. I hated doing it but I
just
wasnt getting enough listeners using high bandwidth.

I saw one live boot collector's website where he specified what brands of
CD-Rs
to use (Tayio Uden - which makes Fujifilm and some Maxell) and which not to
use
(CMC Magnetics which makes Imation, AT&T, Khypermedia and some Memorex and
TDK's). Most rare oldies collectors seem to like Mp3 just fine. Sometimes
thats
the only way to get those hard to find girl group tracks that will never
appear
on a legit CD.

Billy


At 10:50 AM 7/8/03 -0400, you wrote:
>Not to mention-- MP3 is a lossy algorithm for music storage.  Even at 256K
>you are losing bits of musical data-- degrading the audio quality-- of
>anything you encode to MP3.  My wife just got me an Archos (I guess think of
>it as a Windows version of an iPod with a camera) and I'm thinking of it in
>terms of travel and portability.  The digital era has degraded sonic quality
>enough without me adding to my own woes.
>
>I know I've mentioned this before, but in my other life I trade Allman
>Brothers, Grateful Dead, and other jam band recordings (and who can't get
>behind the thrill of a 35-minute pop gem?)  In that community, trades
>involving source material with an MP3 generation are considered gauche; you
>just don't do it
>
>