Tapes to MP3, any help ?

[JonRead]

I am currently trying to put all my audio tapes on to hard disk in MP3 format (must be MP3 format, not OGG, WMA, etc etc). So I am wondering if it makes much difference about quality level. I thought I would use 160K but then I thought, would using 128K be just the same considering the source is analogue tape ? I want to be able to fit loads of hours on to a CD, but I also want the best quality that will be noticable with a tape.

Any ideas guys ?

Cheers.

[KpeX]

Rather than shooting for a target bitrate, IMHO you should try the Lame MP3 encoder using --alt-preset standard or for higher bitrates --alt-preset extreme, these have been tuned very well and the standard preset should be transparent compared to your analog tape. You can get lame from the doom9 download section. You also might want to check out www.hydrogenaudio.org , there are tons of threads and posts on MP3 settings, you might even find someone else converting analog tapes, that forum is much more audio compression related. hth,