Hello there! I've just got a Mp3 Player for my car, and I'd like to know, in your opinion, which encoder/preset should I use to get the best quality/size in my Mp3s?

Thanks!

You'll probably want to look at the FAQ. All your questions are answered there, in detail. But the short answer is Lame 3.90.3. The option you probably want is "--alt-preset standard". A car is pretty noisy though, so you can save some space without a noticeable difference in quality in that situation with "--alt-preset standard -Y".

Thank you very much Phong!!

And if your car player does not support "VBR" (some players still don't), then I would use --alt-preset cbr 160 or --alt-preset cbr 192 if I were you.

The setting recommended in this forum is always lame 3.90.3 with --alt-preset standard. But it may be overkill for you. I don't think there really is an objective answer to the question of best quality/size ratio setting. It all depends on how good hearing you have. With --alt-preset standard you are pretty much guaranteed that not even people with extremely good hearing will be able to hear any differences compared with the original.

My suggestion to you is to test a couple of different settings to see at what setting/bitrate you are able/not able to hear any differences compared to the original. You could test:
--alt-preset standard
--alt-preset standard -Y
--alt-preset 150
--alt-preset 130

The last two settings are ABR settings, meaning that you specify the bitrate you want, which is neat. It usually ends up within +-3 kbps from specified bitrate.

I use all the recommended software with --alt-preset standard for my car mp3 player. I have a few albums encoded at 192k but I can quite clearly hear artifacts. I would not use anything other than APS nowadays.

By the way, you can fit (generally) between 6-9 albums onto a 700mb cd using APS.

I too, would vote for LAME 3.90.3 with --alt-preset standard.

One thing to keep in mind, using that setting, I get approx. 140 songs on a CD.
If most of your driving is cross-country, thats fine, but for around town, back-and-forth to work, I find myself spending more time searching for a song, than just listening to music.

There is such a thing as "too much".

Dex