Currently, I use 3.97 v2-new for music.

I've been ripping audiobooks lately. I use v5 for them.

What do you guys typically use for audiobooks? also been keeping lossless copies, for no good reason probably, but still.

I use V8 for audiobooks/speech

Lossless for speech definitely seems like overkill to me, and even V5 seems a bit large for my needs... V8 is just the right for my DAP and home use

Lossless probably overkill, yes.

A lot of the audiobooks are live plays, actually, in which case the v5 might be justified.

I could understand v5 for plays, especially if there's music or lots of sound effects. The speech/audiobooks I listen to are strictly speech though.

I use WavPack for 11 kHz 8 bit mono voice files because it compresses better than MP3 without losing fidelity. Files average about 8 kbps.

actually, with some testing, I've found that v8 might actually be overkill for complex plays, I'm listening to shakespeare right now... it's good 'nuff. V5 is definitely overkill for audiobooks then.

Almost all audio books are mono (and I probably wouldn’t care if I ran across one that wasn’t). A 22kHz sample is totally adequate (often less, but it is easier to standardize). Thus my mp3 audio books are V8, mono, 22,050 Hz sample rate. I've put almost 50 hours on one CD-R.

Well, quite a few plays are in stereo, so I'd like to preserve that. In any case, joint stereo should handle any discrepencies between stereo recordings of mono tracks, and mono recordings of mono tracks.