Audio compression setting...

[Commonboy]

I'm trying to encode a large mpeg file to a smaller avi file. What setting should I put in the MPEG layer-3 compression menu?

I see a list of:

56kBit/s 24000Hz Stereo 7Kb/s
48kBit/s 24000Hz Stereo 6Kb/s
40kBit/s 24000Hz Stereo 5Kb/s
56kBit/s 22050Hz Stereo 7Kb/s
48kBit/s 22050Hz Stereo 6Kb/s
40kBit/s 22050Hz Stereo 5Kb/s
.
.
.
.
.
.
etc..

My movie originally has 44KHz, Stereo, 224Kbps layer ii for its audio. What setting should I use for the audio compression given my case?

[Hanty]

I assume you're using nandub/vdub for the audio, don't. They are both quirky when it comes to encoding sound. Go for Besweet and/or Headac3 instead. On audio I personally wouldn't go lower than 160kbps VBR but there's no definitive rule.

[Teegedeck]

Just can't resist to recommend my personal favourite setting (though it really is a 'MP3-community' favourite). Just use the 'fast standard' preset in BeSweet (or the command line '--alt-preset fast standard'). The average bitrate of the resulting file could well be somewhere around 160 kbps but it is true VBR with very intelligent tweaks.