Hey there, If I were to go down the max quality route, why not use MP4 rather than MP3 in step 2? Your knowledge is clearly much better than mine, but I understand MP4 is generally better than MP3, just wondering why that is not the case here.
Also when creating these high quality files, how much bigger are they typically that standard "good" MP3's. 10% 100%??
you're going from lossless to lossy format (.wav to .mp3, .m4a, etc) so you're losing *something* already. if you were to A/B mp3 with m4a, you'd be pretty hard pressed to find any difference in sound quality. i myself have a really hard time discerning any difference between a CD and a resulting high quality VBR -v0 mp3, unless it's a standard recording that i am very, very familiar with (MFSL counting crows - august and everything after - i can pick the CD over the mp3 9 out of 10 times on most passages). that being said, most of the time you're out and about or in your car or whatever, and you won't hear the difference at all.
i use an M-Audio audio interface with Shure SE530s, Audio Technica AD-ATH700, Sennheiser HD280 Pros, and Sennheiser HD580. it's not the best amazing gear ever but it's probably better than 95% of most folks.
as for file size, the beauty of VBR is that it generally ramps up on "busier" sections of songs (i.e. it will bump up the bitrate to between 256 kbps and 320 kbps) and it will drop the bitrate down to ~32-96 kbps on silent or quieter sections of songs, which are not as demanding. this not only ensures that not much detail is lost on the "busier" sections, but it also saves space on the quieter sections or silent sections. a 192 kbps CBR (constant bit rate) mp3 will lose out on some quality in some spots, and also unnecessarily run at 192 kbps on quieter/silent sections as well, which wastes space in the file itself. VBR is generally the way to go for lossy formats.
if you are listening to an album like M83 - Hurry Up, We're Dreaming, the file sizes of those songs are going to be really, really high, based on the music and how it was recorded. the difference between a -v0 or -v2 and a 320 kbps CBR rip is probably going to be negligible, and the VBR is going to be significantly larger than a 128 or 192 kbps rip. on a quiet singer-songwriter album, you might find a -v0 rip to be the same size or smaller than a 128 or 192 CBR rip. it all depends on the album.
hope that helps.
(Using Windows 8)
