I’m glad you brought this up. We have had lots of discussions about this but not in a while.

Nice chart. I question one thing in your chart. In my opinion, a rate of 128 kbps is not the same audio quality in an MP3 as it is in a WMA. As I wrote many years ago in the first sticky post in the Tips & Tricks Forum, the BIAB WMA files at 128 sound to me like an MP3 running at 160 to 192. I would have placed the ‘Standard’ entry in the BIAB column at the 160 row. Plus, some of the BIAB sounds are mono, which I think reduces the artifacts a bit.

You are correct about file sizes being bigger the better the quality gets. The discussions we’ve had on possibly downloading the audiophile version always include the suggestion to use lossless compression. I only use 320 for an MP3, and I switched to FLAC for most uses a few years back.

Avoiding yet another hard drive each year would be nice, especially for the folks in Europe paying the VAT. And if the audiophile version with compression still couldn’t be made small enough for most to download, perhaps it could ship just the updated or new files on some form of flash drive. Whatever applies to the discussion of making the audiophile size smaller should be useful for the regular version at some improved higher rate.


BIAB 2025 Win Audiophile. Software: Studio One 7 Pro, Swam horns, Acoustica-7, Notion 6, Song Master Pro, Win 11 Home. Hardware: Intel i9, 32 Gb; Roland Integra-7, Presonus 192 & Faderport 8, Royer 121, Adam Sub8 & Neumann 120 monitors.