I need some suggestions of what is the most popular program to use to convert wave files to the mp3 format that will maintain the highest quality of sound. I ask this because I just finished my first song in PTPA-11, and established an account and uploaded the song on Soundclick.com, but the playback on soundclick sounds pretty bad as compared to the playback of the mp3 file here resident on my comp. And of course really bad compared to my original wave file.
I think maybe the bitrate probably comes into play here, but not being all that comp savvy, I'm really just guessing. If this is true then my question becomes what conversion prog do most of you use to do this
and at what bitrate should be used (the higher the better as I understand it)? I used the converter that's built into powertracks (Merge Audio and DXi Tracks to Compressed File). Is this not a good idea or does everyone use an independent prog of some sort to do this to maximize maintaining the highest quality audio as possible? There must be a way of producing higher quality mp3's as other's songs I have heard on soundclick sound really great and as good as mine sounds here (audio quality) in my wave format.

Again, as always any suggestions and/or help is greatly appreciated.

Larry