LAME Brain

LAME is considered superior to the Fraunhofer encoder (used by mmjb) at higher bitrates (and 192 qualifies as a relatively higher bitrate. At low bitrates (128), the Fraunhofer encoder is perhaps a little better.

To rip in MC9 at best quality, first you'll need to change the ripper to "Digital Secure" (It's in digital burst by default).

For the encoder, choose MP3 VBR encoder, and choose custom for quality--this will automatically give you the --alt-preset fast standard setting for the LAME encoder (it creates files that average about 192 kb/s, in VBR mode).

There are ways to tweak it even further, but it gets a little complicated, and I think you'll be very happy with the above settings, which IMHO are superior to ripping/encoding at 192 VBR in MMJB...

Yeah, thanks for the clear instructions.

Is there a brief description of how the VBR encoder works ? I used to rip everything at 192kbps using MusicMatch.

I'm just surprised to see this method rip tracks as low as 145kbps whilst also reaching a peak of 214kbps with others -- I'd like to understand the process a little more, that's all.

Thanks...yeah, I meant 'rip' not 'burn'. Apologies for that.

Looks like I'm getting a size reduction of about 7 to 8% per album which, over a 15Gig iPod, amounts to quite a few extra tracks and I can't discern a noticible difference in quality (either improvement or degradation) over 192kbps via MM.