There’s no technical reason for 320 CBR but the space loss from a VBR ~224 encode to the CBR 320 is minimal compared to 320 vs flac around 1000. I do keep two copies of my collection for space reasons though - one in flac and one at 320. My phone is still a limiting factor to from a space perspective, I can’t store my entire collection on it in flac but I do choose to use it where I’m actively listening to an album through the weeks. The rest can be mp3 because it’s usually a single song that gets in my head.
I don’t really have MP3-only use cases anymore, but back when I did, it was mostly where transparency was achieved rather easily, like listening to music on the go with… non-perfect headphones, and on those cases, I went with lame’s -V5 IIRC which is closer to 130 kbit/s or so. For higher quality, but not lossless (storage was still expensive back then) I used Musepack. But high bitrate MP3 was almost never needed.
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There’s no technical reason for 320 CBR but the space loss from a VBR ~224 encode to the CBR 320 is minimal compared to 320 vs flac around 1000. I do keep two copies of my collection for space reasons though - one in flac and one at 320. My phone is still a limiting factor to from a space perspective, I can’t store my entire collection on it in flac but I do choose to use it where I’m actively listening to an album through the weeks. The rest can be mp3 because it’s usually a single song that gets in my head.
I don’t really have MP3-only use cases anymore, but back when I did, it was mostly where transparency was achieved rather easily, like listening to music on the go with… non-perfect headphones, and on those cases, I went with lame’s -V5 IIRC which is closer to 130 kbit/s or so. For higher quality, but not lossless (storage was still expensive back then) I used Musepack. But high bitrate MP3 was almost never needed.