[gacek]

"Online stores have cranked up the audio quality to a fat 256 Kbps. [...] It’s certainly better than most of the stuff out on BitTorrent."

Oh really?

Even wide open trackers have a lot of stuff encoded in 320/FLAC. And I guess no one bothers with anything less than that on sites that specialize in music.

It's the age of movie piracy now, but music piracy is not dead.

[Zev]

Even wide open trackers have a lot of stuff encoded in 320/FLAC.

And for the most part, the people encoding these rips in FLAC admit that they can't tell the difference between 320kbps and V0, let alone FLAC and V0.

In other words: 256kbps is good enough for the very large majority of the people out there. And a file encoded at 256kbps with AAC is higher quality than that encoded at 256kbps with MP3.

[daeken]

The real benefit to lossless encodings is that you don't experience a second generation of loss when you want to transcode. Going from, say, MP3 to AAC is pointless and causes considerably more loss than FLAC to AAC. But for most people, an MP3 or DRM-free AAC file is Good Enough (TM).

[pearle]

Exactly -- for me it's all about transcoding and not locking myself into a lossy format. This is why I rip all of my CDs to flac and not AAC/MP3.

[StavrosK]

I stop being able to tell the difference at 200ish kbps for mp3, 130ish for Ogg. Anything above that, I'm just deaf to.

[AndyKelley]

When I listen to my own tracks in the studio, and then export to 320 kbps mp3, I hear an obvious difference. But when I listen to professionally produced tracks, I can't tell a difference between 320 and 256. I think it has to do with the mastering. But it still worries me, so all my stuff is in 320 kbps mp3 or higher.