If you’re like me, you’re not willing to shell out several hundred dollars to buy an 80GB iPOD to carry and store your music collection. In my case, I chose the 4GB Sansa e260 as my music player. Having ripped my music at high bitrates for improved quality, I soon became dissatisfied with the capacity of my player. At that point, I decided to do some experimenting with LAME‘s different encoding options in order to determine what settings gave me the minimum file size while providing acceptable sound quality. For me, LAME’s variable bit rate preset 5 provides a good compromise between sound quality and file size. Continue reading →