Mp3 compression

I find it frustrating to hear Mp3 version after spendind time mixing and mastering. For example effects I put on vocal cant be heard or change once compressed.
Is there a technique for preparing a recording for Mp3?

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i am not sure i fully understand your question ... could you develop a little and describe what you're doing ?

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TU, what are the settings you use for generating your MP3? I can only advice you to use 320 kbit/s it should be good enough to hear effects etc. you put in .

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A high-quality MP3 (say 256Kb/s or over) should be indistinguishable to a raw WAV file to the human ear. So if you are loosing quality then either a) you're not encoding correctly or b) you're not encoding at a high enough quality.

Could you elaborate on how you make an MP3? Are you rendering directly to MP3 from a DAW or are you mixing down to a .wav file and then encoding that? What tools do you use?

A way that works for me is to render down to a high quality 24 bit 48Khz wav file from DAQ, open in Audacity, normalise, and use the high quality LAME encoder settings. See http://www.audacityteam.org/

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