$495<ul><li><a href="http://forums.audiworld.com/a4/msgs/1880856.phtml">http://forums.audiworld.com/a4/msgs/1880856.phtml</a</li></ul>

Mono - Duh, Both channels are mixed together before encoding.

Stereo - Each channel is encoded independently of each other. If you have a 128Kb MP3 each channel gets 64Kb of data to store each frame in.

Joint Stereo (J-Stereo) - The encoder analyzes the sound and encodes a shared stream then encodes differences between the two separately. If you have a 128Kb MP3. The encoder may decide a frame can be represented by a 96kb of joint data and use 32Kb to encode the sound that can not be represented in the joint stream. This method will yield a better sounding MP3 because you are using the available space more effectively.

You can't the channel mode after the fact. You have to re-encode. LAME 3.90.3 does a great job with J-Stereo. Years ago most encoders sucked at J-Stereo so no one ever used it. Basically now you get better sounding MP3's with the same file size.

About the clipping. MP3's have a 8-bit value for a scaling factor for each frame. MP3Gain adjusts the scaling factor to make sure no clipping occurs during decoding. Most MP3's seem to clip after they have been encoded. You can also normalize all your MP3's losslessly. You can also undo any changes to the scale factors.<ul><li><a href="http://mp3gain.sourceforge.net/">http://mp3gain.sourceforge.net/</a</li></ul>