Although it's been gone over many times that ABR at lower bitrates is better than VBR, I was messing with Gabriel's command line from his --alt-preset medium thread from a while back.



After a couple modifications I'm having what I think are very good sounding results considering how low the average bitrates are coming out:

--alt-preset fast standard --lowpass 16 -b 80 -B 224 --athaa-sensitivity -11 --nsmsfix 3 -V5 -Y

Limiting a VBR with the -B 224 is usually considered bad, but it was really needed to keep the average bitrate down. It basically looks like an ABR but with the benefit in that it'll scale the bitrate like a VBR, so in the end I'm getting between 110-150 kbps files. I'm not hearing flanging artifacts or terribly distorted cymbals the two most annoying artifacts.

The -V5 setting looks pretty high, but the sound quality to me still sounds reasonable.

I use fast standard because otherwise it's just really slow. And I also can't hear any difference between the two and fast standard tends to drop the bitrate a little more.

Check it out, I think it's a decent option for encoding for portable players and such.