I stayed away from MP3 for a long time because of the poor audio quality of most encodings. I have long held the belief that "if you're going to do something, do it right." For that reason, I cannot see why so many people put so much effort into encoding OTR at rediculously low bit rates such as 16 kbps, 24 kbps, and even 32 kbps. I realize that most OTR is not "high fidelity," but today's copies become tomorrow's masters, so I would rather sacrifice a little storage space and encode OTR at much higher rates to preserve what quality may be left and ensure that my MP3 sounds exactly like the cassette, reel, CD, or vinyl master. For this reason, I now offer my own enccodings at 128 kbps mono (yes, that's right!) for trade. At this high rate, the reproduction is nearly CD quality--at least my ears can't tell the difference. At a rate of 128 kbps mono, it is posible to store 12 hours of audio on one CD-R--that's at least 24 thirty-minute shows. Hey, that's still better than just 2-3 shows on standard audio CD! And with the price of blank CD's what is is, this still boils down to just 3-5 cents per show at most. And to me, it's worth the extra penny or two and the slight extra storage space to be able to have MP3 CD's that sounds like they should. At 64 kbps mono, the sound is generally quite good, but I can still detect some artificial digital artifacts, so I'd prefer to double the encoding rate to 128 kbps mono for best possible sound. Want to trade high-quality MP3? Check out my list of MP3 discs that I've encoded at 128kbps/44kHz for best sound. If you see something you want, just e-mail me and we'll work something out!. I'd really love to start a trading circle of folks committed to encoding OTR at high bitrates, say, at least 64 kbps. Think you might be interested? Check out a new Yahoo Group devoted to high-quality MP3's of old time radio: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/OTR_HiQ_mp3