Ordinarily I'd blog this to the Digital Music Digest, but as that blog will be retired shortly, I thought I'd point out this well-researched article on lossy audio codecs, which features the following key quotes:
MP3 encoding to a 192-kbit/sec bit rate is actually faster than encoding to 160 kbits/sec...
With few exceptions, I found that the WMA encoder's performance approximated that of the MP3 encoder set to "fastest encode," while its quality at least matched (and at lower bit rates exceeded) that of MP3 files created using the "highest quality" setting. RealAudio's encoder speed was approximately the same as that of WMA and MP3's "fastest encode," but here the quality news wasn't so good.
I'll have to look into these things a little more later...
