I am not happy with the way in which RM supports recording to MP3 VBR. The UI offers only very limited control to what LAME can actually do - even for the average, non-expert user.
By checking "VBR" and one of the four "x Kbps" options there are just four different VBR settings available. Looking at the distribution of frames in VBR recordings from RM it seems that the approach taken by RM is to treat the selected Kbps value as minimum and 320 kbps is always the max limit. E.g. for VBR 192Kbps this results in frames 192..320 Kbps, for VBR 128 Kbps it is 128..320 Kbps. Having such huge ranges does make sense. If I am going for a lower avg bitrate to give smaller file size priority over sound quality, then why should I include frames with max bitrate?
IMO a much better approach would be to support the LAME "quality setting".
This setting -Vx which has been introduced with LAME 3.98 defines a 10 level scale for sound quality. The different levels are tuned and oriented towards audible quality and not just kbps figures. They range from "-V0" for for max quality (which is actually 320 CBR) to "-V9" for min quality and storage. The recommended setting for good to excellent quality is "-V2" is VBR with 190 Kbps target bitrate (with most frames in 170–210 Kbps). Which is not possible to directly produce from RM.
Actually, a long explanation for a short request:
Would it be possible to support LAME quality setting in one of the next versions?
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