well I didnt find much about the new preset (--alt-preset medium) that lame 3.93 introduced here. I encoded some of my Rock music tracks and found that it went mostly to 160k frames and bitrate average was around ~160k also, which makes it a perfect choice for sharing mp3 with your friends when "size still matters and you dont poke around the tracks looking for small glithes with 200$ earphones"

Since I cant usually tell the results between a well-made 128k rip and the original it would be cool to have some opinions from ppl who also tried it. The size gain sure is interesting and may make more ppl that just want "very ok" quality using the presets.

"when "size still matters and you dont poke around the tracks looking for small glithes with 200$ earphones"
.... . That made my day!

I've been listening to a lot of the presets on 3.90.2 and 3.93.1, and --alt preset medium sounds fine on all my music. I haven't tried it on any test clips though. To me, it's ok; but I also, listen to it on a laptop(which has a tiny bit of static, even when you're not doing anything that's easily heard, and has little static blips when you minimize/maximize something ) with $20 headphones, so it isn't like I'd be able to point anything big out anyway.

It has been discussed many many times before on this board, but hearing artifacts does not necessarily require expensive or 'high-end' equipment. This is a common misconception.

I know about the high end equiptment, but when the equiptment itself creates its own artifacts of static, it tends to be louder than other ones created by audio compression, except for one clip I tried. Sorry

It's mostly, a question of,

1) Do the people that'll be listening to the --alt preset medium MP3s, know what to look for in MP3 artifacts(have they trained themselves yet)?

2) Will they be listening to the music on headphones or speakers?

P.S.
Question; wasn't lame 3.93 buggy anyway?

In my experience, --alt-preset medium was very slow and Lame 3.93.1 produced clicks and pops at the end of some tracks that were audible on my hardware players but not using Winamp on my PC.

Other than that, the quality seemed OK.