OK, I've found VBR - what setting should I use? It's currently set to 6%

I have no idea. I'm not familiar with the software you're using. AudioCatalyst has nice little descriptions to accompany each setting, and they sound accurate. Perhaps your software has a similar set of descriptions?

You might have more than one setting to determine the quality, too, so look for it... One level of quality will always be the bitrate: i.e., the more bits per second of data, the more high frequencies and better stereo separation they can play back in a given frame. But another level of quality might be: How hard do you want the CPU to work to get the optimum compression? Some encoders let you adjust this, so that the compression can be done either quickly or carefully, or somewhere in between. Fraunhofer's command-line encoder offers both, but AudioCatalyst doesn't offer that option, it just has a single quality slider (plus a high-frequency checkbox buried in the advanced options).

Again, keep in mind that it's always a quality-for-filesize tradeoff. When deciding how to encode your music, decide what kind of disk space you're willing to pay for to store those 400+ albums. You might discover that you'd need a pricey 50gb to store all your albums at the highest quality settings, and you'll have to compromise a bit. Listen carefully to the albums you've encoded so far and see how much space they take up.

Tony Fabris
Empeg #144