It is technically possible, assuming that CPU is not a matter here, to have even higher lossless compression?? like a 40 Mb song compress to <20Mb ( 18 - 19 Mb?? )

If so, Monkey whould surely make such a compressor. I think there are indeed technical limitations on the compression. There is still some data to be compressed - and well, you cant put everything in nothing... But sometimes the monkey archieves compression ratios more than 50%, but thats still say 600 kb/sec.

I'd go for lossy - like musepack (you won't notice the difference, I'm sure... if you can, you have golden ears, which will be appreciated by the musepack developers - hehe )

with mpc (you probably already know, but whatever :insane: ) you get 200 kb/sec, which is again 3 times smaller than lossless...

*edit - smiley didnt work out

The probem is i may want to transcode them to other format later. I have thought of MPC with brandead..... but for trancode isn't Lossless still the best option??

Yes, lossless would be best for transcoding. However, Musepack at braindead transcodes very well.

I did a purely subjective test on two clips from Nickelback and Bonnie Raitt and couldn't tell the difference between the braindead and --alt-preset 128.
This was purely subjective, for my own interest and only for illustration (incidentally I couldn't detect any difference between the wave and mpc braindead).

Note
My ears have been attached to each side of my head for 57 years and obviously there has to be a degradation in my hearing

auldyin

I encode mpc's with --extreme, and transcode them to mp3's with lame. Thats for my portable mp3player, and I use mostly some --alt-preset 96 - so I dont think Musepack is the quallity limiting factor here... I think you can transcode at least up to 128 kb/sec mp3 or even more when you have encoded with musepack --extreme. Insane and braindeath are overkill, exept when you want to transcode to >160 kb/sec mp3, imho. And who whould do that??? for an mp3player, you rarely need it - the background noise in train/bus etc is (for me) destroying everything above 128 kb/sec!!!