Tempe,
mp3 sound quality is a matter of HOW MUCH compression is used.
Obviously the more compression the lower the quality.
But the basic fact is that there is FAR MORE sonic information
on a CD than ANY human ears can discern.
Like for example when "compressing" a .WAV/CDA file to an mp3 the first thing that happens is that ALL sound information above 15.8kHz, which very few adults can hear
anyway, PARTICULARLY in the imperfect environment of a truck cab.
If you record everything at 320kb/sec and THINK you can hear a quality difference it's in your head.
For practical purposes the only thing gained by using higher bitrates than 192kb/sec
is you take up more space on the disc.
at 192Kb/sec you can store 7times as much music on the disc
at 320kb/sec you can store about 4 times as much music on a disc.
so presuming that the albums you want to record on your mp3-CD are 80minutes long you can fit SEVEN of them on a single CD-R.
I find that typically the albums I want to listen to run 45-55minutes,
so I can frequently fit ten to twelve albums on a single mp3/CD-R disc
In a moving truck with highway wind noise, engine noise, tire noise,
you can't really hear the difference between a CD and a 128kb/sec
mp3 recording, but even so I never use a bit rate lower than 160kb/sec.
though on downloaded stuff I don't have much choice.
higher compression rates (lower bit-rates) not only lose data but can create "Compression artifacts", sounds not present in the original recording.
One distinct advantage of mp3 formats is the included metadata content, which includes artist and song title and can include other data (album?)
With CD's you typically need to tediously program that information
into our head unit or player...
And there is frequently Volume normalization applied which prevent tracs from different sources from being at greatly
differing volume levels.
AD