As a distribution format for mixed-down music that will be consumed from a portable device's internal storage, 320kb/s VBR is great. There's some unfortunate i

As a distribution format for mixed-down music that will be consumed from a portable device's internal storage, 320kb/s VBR is great. There's some unfortunate irony in that we just got out from under the MP3 patents, which mean that MP3 encoders can finally get mainlined and won't require screwing around like we're all gotten used to for a decade+ (having to add some extra repo to your apt.sources or equivalent file, etc.), but at the same time the consumption patterns of music have shifted again, away from portable devices with high-density storage like iPods, and towards streaming particularly over cell-data networks. There is an argument, although I do not like some of its conclusions, that some of the newer codecs are preferable to MP3 if you are working within <96kb/s for a stereo signal so that you can put it over a 3G connection or something. MP3 starts to sound audibly bad at lower bitrates, depending on what you're listening to. My cellphone today is a much more powerful device than my 2007 iPod, but doesn't have nearly the same amount of available onboard storage (and what storage it does have is split between music and photos and software and other stuff). So the tradeoffs that make for an ideal codec choice on the iPod aren't clearly great on the phone. IMO, this is an argument for keeping your personal music collection in an uncompressed/losslessly-compressed format, so that you can recompress it easily based on how it's actually going to be used.