I'm using Audiograbber to rip the CDs and LAME 3.96.1 to encode.

What's the best setting to use for LAME? I usually use:
lame -c -h -b 320 Filename.wav Filename.mp3

And also, what's the difference between joint-stereo and stereo?

Thanks. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

List of recommended LAME settings

JointStereo

Please do a little research before posting and read the FAQ.
You should look into using EAC as your ripper also.

Concerning the above link to the wiki, it should be mentioned, that "a saving in bitrate" does not necessarily "only" mean "lower filesize"... but also higher quality. JointStereo is usually used to save bits on the stereofield, and then using those saved bits to encode the music itself at higher quality. JointStereo (unless its in low-bitrates) at least with LAME is used in a very conservative manner in higher bitrates, which means that it will only save bits in situations when it does NOT result in lower quality of the stereo-field.

The important thing to remember is that nothing comes out of nowhere - available space (bitrate) is a limited resource, so the encoder has to choose how to distribute the available bits when encoding. Since an audiotrack does not just consist of the stereofield (obviously - ever tried listening to a stereofield without music?), a higher spending on the stereofield means lower quality of the rest of the audio(because there are only so many bits available to spend). JointStereo in that case saves bits on the stereofield when there is no difference perceivable and then uses those bits to encode the music at higher quality.

The VBR-Presets automatically switch between jointstereo and full-stereo throughout the song automatically - so its a lossless/lossy stereofield encoding hybrid.

What all this comes down to: just choose one of the presets and you're done. No additional switches needed (in many cases, additional switches will even do more harm than good).

I'll also mention that if you are going to be archiving your cd's, you may want to look into EAC or Plextools if you own a Plextor drive for secure ripping.

Well, i've always used the standard preset with lame 3.90.3. Sounds great, job done. Now you can get on with enjoying the music instead of analyzing it

... so then, would you expect a 256kbit joint-stereo encode to sound better than a 256kbit stereo encode? Seems like you would lose part of the soundfield or stereo effect.

Yes, of course.

Not, of course.

See here for explanations: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=24029

I'm really tired of this joint stereo (or to be more precize, mid-side stereo) encoding mode.
It is definitely should be added to FAQ, IMHO.