Streaming Audio Tutorial Page 6 — Optimizing Audio for Streaming The Winamp broadcasting plug-in can handle resampling your MP3 files (to reflect bandwidth availability) on the fly as necessary, so feel free to keep everything encoded at 128 or 192kbps. However, this does require more computer CPU so if the only reason you're making your MP3s is for streaming at 24kbps, you may as well encode them at that rate. Also, if you are streaming at a bitrate lower than 96kbps and want to go the extra mile, consider doing a little compression, normalization, and even removing (using equalization) the extreme highs and lows before encoding the audio file to MP3. Depending on your source material, this tends to result in somewhat more legible sound quality at lower bitrates. Bitrate Breakdown: Commonly used streaming bitrates and their subjective audio quality: Bitrate Sonic Equivalent 16kbps bad am radio 24kbps bad fm radio 56kbps passable fm radio 128kbps the mythical "near-cd" quality 192kbps 99 percent of your listeners will think it's uncompressed To last page of Streaming Audio To next page of Streaming Audio Back to the HTML Home Page