i recorded a tape with sony soundforge and i recorded it as mono because thats what tapes are lol if i record it as stereo i only sound in 1 channel. So when i save the wav as mono and encode with lame with the alt preset standard settings i get 128 for the whole song...it doesnt jump up and down like it normally does. But if i save the wav as stereo it jumps up and down but it only goes up to like 192...well it jumps from 128 to 192 lol is it just because of the music or am i doing something wrong since i get so low bitrate?

who says that tapes are mono in general? Or did you say that your tapes were recorded in mono? I used to have tapes and they were all stereo...

Anyway, I think --alt preset standard encodes in 128kbps by default when the file only has one channel. If you save it as stereo and --alt preset standard doesn't jump higher than 192kbps that's most likely because LAME doesn't need a higher bitrate to encode it...so nothing wrong with it and considering your source it makes sense