I was wondering what bitrate XM satellite radio uses so when Nero 6 comes out, I can get a pretty good idea of the quality XM has.

Reading the reviewer's impression in this article, I'd guess it's 64 kbps for music stations and 32 kbps for talk shows:

http://www.m-emag.com/article.asp?section_...mber=1&preview=

I have a sample that the same codec fails to encode properly at 80 kbps. I'm sure there's plenty of tweaking ahead, but I wouldn't expect hi-fi quality from these
radio stations.

Those with the encoder, try to encode at 64-80 kbps and listen to the female voice.
Use Vorbis and compare

http://s33d.dyndns.org/Nini-WAV-Short1.ape