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I guess I meant that with lossy compression, it's possible to achieve no noticable loss in quality but with a far lower file size than the equivalent lossless compression; it's certainly possible. 32Kbps MP3s will sound shit for example.
Sorry, I didn't realise you were looking for the quality setting... What piece of kit are you using to do the ripping?
In most cases, it's a case of choosing the sample rate, so in Windows Media Player for example, it's Tools->Options, Rip Music tab and there's an "audio quality" slider. It also allows you to choose the format itself, which makes a difference (128KBps MP3 roughly equivalent to 64KBit WMA, which means (loosely) that the WMA file will be half the size for the same quality).
― KeithW (kmw), Monday, 3 January 2005 11:16 (nineteen years ago) link
The question and some of these answers made my head hurt.
The basic rule if you're ripping your CDs into digital format, specifially MP3, is that 128kbps is considered 'typical', and to many people is the rough equivalent of CD quality.
You say that you don't buy that, so my suggestion would be to bump it up to either 192 or 256 kbps. If you're a true audio fanatic, go to 320 kbps instead.
You will lose information with any of these settings, but the theory is that you'll lose information that your brain won't notice. It's a matter of endless debate, but really, just rip the same track several times in different quality settings, and see what your threshold is. Then go with the lowest kbps setting you can still tolerate.
― Sean Carruthers (SeanC), Monday, 3 January 2005 16:27 (nineteen years ago) link