What LAME settings do you recommend for new audio plays & theatre?
What LAME settings do you use or new audio plays & theatre?

I don't mean OTR radio plays but new productions like Big Finish's Dr. Who series and Garrison Keillor productions issued on CD. These are audio plays but also include music in the background as well as sound effects.

Since they are on a CD you could say to get the full effect you need to go APS. Another idea would be to APS with a -Y switch since they were probably meant to go on FM anyhow. Another idea could be to go to a very low bitrate scheme and bug the musical parts of them since the music, while high quality, is just for the background anyhow.

Anyway I'd like to hear what people are using and recommend. I've tended to go to low bitrates for audio books but that is because you often just have a voice.

I'd experiment with some ABR preset setting like --alt-preset 110 ... this should be a handy compromise between quality and filesize.

APS does not go lower than 128 kbps on signal parts IIRC so it would clearly be a waste of bandwith ... normal (and mostly monaural) speech does not need that kind of bitrate IMO.

I wouldn't completely rule out --aps, on recordings which are mostly voice it doesn't tend to waste too many bits - I've encoded audio books and the like with it before and they've come out averaging ~130. Give it a go as well as JeanLuc's suggestion there and then just keep the one which fits your requirements the best.