This always drives me nuts. In June 2001 I downloaded a complete album encoded with Lame 3.87 at CBR 256. Today I found the same album encoded with Lame 3.91 at CBR 192. So the question is, what files do I keep? The one's with the latest version of Lame and lower bits or the ones with the higher bits and older version of Lame? Which files are better (besides the ones that sound better to me - although I know that's the response I'm going to get)?

D. Duck

I would choose the 3.87 256 kbit/s files, especially if the 192 kbit/s files were straight gpsycho.

ff123

Hard to tell unless you know the commandlines which were used to encode the 2 tracks. You might get a better quality (and definitely better quality for bitrate) if the 192 was encoded using "--alt-preset CBR 192", but if you can't tell what it was encoded with, it might be safe to stick with the larger one, or perform your own listening test.