When I ripped and encoded my CDs last year, I selected 96kbps so that I could fit as many as possible on a portable mp3 player.

I used lame and unfortunately set the sampling rate to 32khz rather than 44khz, because in my naivete, I assumed that I would get an equivalent encoding quality (albeit limited to a 16khz top end) to doing them at 128kbps and 44khz sampling. Of course, I now realise that lame defaults to a 15khz highpass filter anyway!

My problem is that 32khz sampling is none-standard and some players won't handle it. Fortunately the Empeg does, but Windows Media Player on a Pocket PC ignores such files.

After some experiments, it seems that there may be no difference whatsoever between files encoded at 96kbps\32khz sampling, and files encoded at 96kbps\44khz sampling. The file size is exactly the same to the byte.

I am wondering if there is any software that will process each frame in an mp3 file and convert the flag that specifies the sampling rate from 32 to 44, so that I wouldn't need to re-rip and re-encode all my cds. I am reasonably happy with the quality at 96kbs, as my ears are getting quite old now :-)