I have a bunch of albums encoded with LAME 3.96 at VBR V0. Is there any reason for me to replace them with files encoded with 3.98.2?

Or is 3.96 fine? These were all encoded a while ago, anything I encode now is with 3.98 or 3.98.2.

Thanks.

You're probably fine with what you've got. If you want to be sure, you could encode some songs with the newer version and abx test them to be sure.

If you had those tracks in lossless then reencoding would be trivial and I would go ahead. Since that is apparently not the case, there is no way that I, personally, would rerip everything for such a minor difference. YMMV

The default for 3.96 was --vbr-old. The quality was okay. 3.98(.2) is much better though with the new default vbr-code (--vbr-new) that saw a HUGE improvement between 3.97 and 3.98.

In most cases, I myself can't distinguish FLAC and mp3 -V0 anymore for 3.98 in contrast to ealier lame encoders. That means that I am re-ripping and encoding all my CD audio files with the new encoder...

If everything sounds good to you, why bother?

Don't reencode. The 3.9x series is stable. Differences at high bitrates will be largely non existant. The recommended vbr-new from v3.97 is way faster but the quality advantage over the old vbr method is subtle, though the current vbr-new is much better than 3.90 vbr-new. Again V0 makes these even less of an issue.

Really the most important thing is that the music sounds good to you and is enjoyable. I have a lot of rips I made years ago that are still in CBR 192 that sounds good to me, and as such I don't see any reason to re-encode all those CD's and LP's as they're in the 500's. But in your case I'd say it depends on how many CD's you have. If it's 10 or 20 then I guess it's no big deal re-encoding them just for the hell of it.

My advice is: Keep your rips.

No need to re-encode.

Would that entail re-ripping, or are these albums transcoded from a lossless format such as FLAC? If it's just a matter of letting dbpoweramp or foobar or similar software churn away for a few hours (or days) at transcoding them again, then I'd do it. I wouldn't go to the trouble of re-ripping.

Absolutely true!!

I can speak only for myself here: For me lame-3.96 isn't good enough so I am using FLAC / lame-3.98 ...