I have some free time so I'm taking an audio recording of one of Pastor Mike's sermons and encoding it as an mp3 again and again, but tweaking the settings each time. I put these sermons on our church website so I do have a practical reason for being so geeky. My original settings were:

lame test.wav test9.mp3 -V9 -q0 -B32 --lowpass 11.6 --resample 24

This was giving me some very uneven results. Lots of weird skipping during times when Mike wasn't speaking. The file size was good, but my goal is to come up with something that sounds a lot better and doesn't have skipping issues.

To be honest, I really don't know what I'm doing or how most of the settings really affect the audio. But it is simple enough to plug in different numbers, and add or subtract different settings and compare the results.

As of right now the winner seems to be:

lame test.wav test9.mp3 --abr 32 --resample 24

The file size gets a bit larger. From 9.8 megs to 13.7 megs. The quality is much better, though. I think I'll try these new settings for awhile and see how it holds up. If you actually go to the site and compare audio, the first mp3 to use the new settings will be from 3/22/09.