Well, 256kbps looks better than 128kbps so it seemed like a safe bet and 4-6MB per track isn't significant enough to matter to me in terms of space; not like future audio players aren't going to get larger capacities.
The blind test I read was before iTunes did 256kbps AAC and VBR wasn't an option outside of Windows Media Player, so probably things are better. I just remember my first experience encoding The Beatles Revolver to 64-bit ATRAC3 with my MDLP recorder. It sounded horrific, with audio sounding like bits had been chopped out here and there. After that I never did less than MDLP2 recording. As a result, I'm happy to trust a computer program to achieve good results encoding to a single higher bitrate, but I just don't trust it to make decisions that will sound good using a variable bitrate. May seem irrational, but that's me.
The blind test I read was before iTunes did 256kbps AAC and VBR wasn't an option outside of Windows Media Player, so probably things are better. I just remember my first experience encoding The Beatles Revolver to 64-bit ATRAC3 with my MDLP recorder. It sounded horrific, with audio sounding like bits had been chopped out here and there. After that I never did less than MDLP2 recording. As a result, I'm happy to trust a computer program to achieve good results encoding to a single higher bitrate, but I just don't trust it to make decisions that will sound good using a variable bitrate. May seem irrational, but that's me.
