Joint stereo club!

Same here; with joint stereo just for the Hell of it.

ahh cool.....and werd. i know nothing of interpolation, dithering and such. yeah the nature of timbres in chip is a tricky beast.

indeed!

Bandcamp prefers a lossless format because the user has the option to choose a compressed format to download. Transcoding from one lossy format to another potentially degrades the audio quality, so they prefer a lossless source to derive the lossy formats from.

aac anyone?

44 kHz CBR 192 kbps LAME is usually good for me, but I can see why it might not cut it for a perfectionist in cases like the one 4mat describes. If you want transparency, especially for raw-rendered chipmusic, you'd better go lossless.

With chipmusic if you have interpolation switched off you do need a pretty high kps to avoid a lot of compression artifacts, probably more so than with traditional music. (rather ironic) Personally when using mp3 I go for CBR and 320kps.   An alternative free codec is CELT, it's not well supported yet but offers pretty good playback at low ratios.

i woudl share OGGS but bandcamp prefers FLACS and FLACS are what i use personally for my music collection so that is nice for me

maybe FLACS is overkill for some thing like Chip Music.org though

48/24 and 96/24 make sense for storing an original recording and processing audio, if you want to avoid artefacts or so. For distributing audio for listening, there's really no reason to go above 16-bit (if your format can use bits; the concept of bits typically doesn't exist for lossy formats), or 44.1 kHz/48 kHz.

Maybe related: I've made a comparison of low-kbps mp3 encoders here. Note that for high kbps LAME is pretty good, and what I usually use for mp3 encoding. The latest Ogg/Vorbis is superior in quality/size ratio, so I use that for encoding CDs and stuff.

I can see no reason not to use VBR unless LAME's algortihm obviously messes up. But that happened to me only once or twice, ever.

Also:

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Don't use 48Khz unless you're working directly to video.

a lot of streaming sites like soundcloud transcode your file to 128kbps for streaming purposes, so it could just be that.
personally i'd never use anything lower than 320kbps* for mp3's if possible. the lossy nature of the format means you will lose at least some information in the conversion but the audible difference between 320kbps mp3 and wav is pretty miniscule.

*although i am kinda partial to the smokey character of 96kbps!

320kbps is considered the standard when it comes to the digital distribution of profesh mp3s.. If you ever cared to have your music dropped live in a DJ set, you would do this.