Audio compression fiddling

So, I've been listening to internet radio stations for a while now. I started with EVE-Radio (as a regular thing... I've listened to them on and off for years), and recently have noticed a large number of them using the AAC codec to stream instead of good old MP3.

I've noticed that an MP3 stream tends to start sounding "bad" when you drop below 56k. AAC streams seem to perform better down to about 32k.

This led me to wonder, might it be a good thing to encode your ripped CD's in AAC audio? It's still smaller than the lossless formats, should play in winamp (essential), and should also play on the ipod (nice, if I ever get one).

A bit of digging around, and I found the Nero audio encoder, and some settings to make it work with EAC.

So, here's the CLI options for MP3 (which I use now), and AAC (which I'll test soon).

MP3 Output:

LAME MP3 Encoder
.mp3
C:\Program Files\LAME\lame.exe
--vbr-new -b32 -B320 -V 2
192 kB/s
High Quality

Nero AAC Output:

User Defined Encoder
.m4a
C:\WINDOWS\system32\cmd.exe
/c C:\"Program Files"\NeroAAC\win32\neroaacenc_sse2.exe -q 0.55 -if %s -of %d && C:\"Program Files"\NeroAAC\win32\neroaactag.exe %d -meta:artist="%a" -meta:album="%g" -meta:track="%n" -meta:title="%t" -meta:genre="%m" -meta:year="%y"
192kB/s
High Quality