kaiynne, Jim and Alex B,
I want to thank you all. This string has not only educated me, but I am so pleased that no one gave the kind of condescending replys that unfortunately I see too much from those who know a tiny little piece of information more than someone else. I think you know, like sometimes on hydrogenaudio where I do get entertained at times when there is a battle over settings and techniques which the human ear can't hear anyway. This has been wonderful. We're hear to help each other and I will pass on what I learn to others.
Kaiynne,
For MP3 conversions, to you ever use one of the newer versions of LAME directly, maybe with a GUI interface. There has been a recent major dump of newer LAME versions that are faster and I believe might pack more quality into their "alt" settings.
For me, I do feel that MP3 sounds rather flat, when compared to .oog Vorbis, but .ape sounds sensational with my Sennheiser HD 497 headphones. BUT, all that listening stuff is so subjective and their is always the quality versus disk space issue.
I hate when someone says, "this is the best way", or "this is the only way", makes me cringe. I also do lots and lots of video encoding which I would say, after two years, I feel that I have an assortment of tools for every occasion to convert and edit anything to anything with minimal loss and aggravation.
Unlike some people with video, the audio is an essential part for me, while for some people get absolutely anal about the quality of the video and will do two days of encoding to make things as perfect as they can.
The best format is the one that suits each peson the best. There is NO BEST !!
Usually it seems to be human nature that whatever someone uses the most and has the greatest knowledge of then gets advertised as "THE BEST".