Hi,

I was encoding the new Rolling Stones compilation, Forty Licks, and let EAC run alone while I was out.
When I came back home I noticed that some tracks had bitrates around 127, 129 even though I used, as usual, lame 3.90.2 with APS.
I looked through them with Encspot and found that over 90% of the frames were encoded at 128.

Any idea?

Compilation? Maybe these songs are mono and/or have a low frequency cutoff. Have a look in EAC's wav editor.

Right!

Many of the first stones recordings (at the beginning of the cd) are mono. i've encoded the cd with mpq quality 5 and got a few songs with less than 90kb's B) . so apd will do a good job

Same here... Did that record with MPC --extreme and the bitrates often fell very low. So, nothing to worry about.

Thanks a lot.
I tried to encode the suspect tracks once again and obtained the same result.
They sound fine anyhow, so you're likely to be right.
BTW, I thought that the cds contained remastered versions of the songs.
Nothing to complain if people rips them, if they try to sell the lp at 35 euro (in Italy) with 35 years old recordings...

there are some mono tracks on that album, yes. I actually took those particular tracks and dropped the right channel to get a mono wav and encoded them with --alt-preset standard -b80, per Dibrom's advice on mono tracks. They're a bit smaller than the normal --aps tracks since they're not stereo and because their lowend limit is 80kbps instead of 128