Well, it's not really too vital to your survival, but if anyone's interested, I did test different MP3 codecs for speed vs. quality. For my purposes, the race was between dMC's standard LAME MP3 codec and the MPEG Suite 2000 MP3 codec (http://www.dbpoweramp.com/codec-central-mpeg2000.htm). Here's my unnecessarily lengthy report...first, though, I'm using Windows XP on a Pentium III 1Ghz with 512 RAM...
For this important test, I chose only the finest musical specimen...none other than the 4 minute and 39 seconds of bliss in Amy Grant & Vince Gill's stirring duet "House of Love" - track 4 from Amy's 1994 release of the same title on A&M Records (as if I really needed to tell you all, since I'm sure the disc is in your collection too!)
I also tested other random tracks from Johnny Cash's American IV: The Man Comes Around, Fountains of Wayne's Welcome Interstate Managers, Vigilantes of Love's Summershine, and Pedro the Lion's Control. All conversions were made in dMC's CDGrab.exe, ripping each time from the CD to the specified file/format. However, time results were practically the same, the disc being ripped made not much of a difference. ANYWAY, here were my results as far as encoding time is concerned: (sorry all the colums start to slant here!!)
RIPPING TO.........CONVERSION TIME.....FILESIZE
WAVE - 16/44.1............0:16..............48,063 KB
LAME - 128..................2:45..............4,361 KB
LAME - 320..................1:38.............10,901 KB
MPEG2000 - 128............0:45.............4,359 KB
MPEG2000 - 320............0:51.............10,898 KB
Now, here are my personal opinions on the sound quality:
Well, needless to say, but the WAVE sounded best - full range of the wonderful sonic spectrum (especially for Amy Grant!). As for the others...
LAME - 128kbps -
missing a bit of low end, sounds like standard MP3 compression that you're used to.
MPEG2000 - 128kbps -
missing more of low end than LAME, and highs and mids were a bit more lossy and un-crisp, overall a bit thinner, but not as bad as I expected.
LAME - 320kbps -
better range of sound (of course) than lower bitrate, but still a bit loose on the low end, for most non-archival purposes it would work fine (however, I still prefer Monkey's Audio).
MPEG2000 - 320kbps -
quite impressed again, still a bit thin, naturally not as much as lower bitrate, but did sound a bit falsely compensated in the the ends / low and high ends a bit muddy.
This was certainly a non-technical investigation into the codecs. It took realistically about 25 minutes. However, for those interested, I would guess that for most ears the MPEG2000 codec wouldn't lose too much. For me, the faster conversion is worth the quality loss, as my current project is simply archiving several older (usually untouched) discs for a friend's DJ service, which will never actually play about 90% of the MP3's I'm archiving. If you're deciding for yourself, it's easy to test, and for quick comparison I'd recommend listening to each track in 3 different ways: at low volume, high volume and through decent headphones. And switch back and forth between bitrates listening to the same part of the track on each file.
Bottom line...for this quick project I'm finishing and for my personal listening collection I might possibly use the MPEG2000 codec if I'm in a hurry (because when converting 1000's of wav's to mp3, the faster codec is pretty sweet), but will more than likely stick with dMC's included LAME. However, MP3's for any other purpose, I'll for sure stay safe with LAME. (but i'm still a monkey's audio fan at heart!)
sorry if you wasted your time reading this! thanks & good day...
--brandon