The whole idea:
Small
Portable
High
Archive
is imho about the tradeoff between quality and file size.
I think you and I have a bit of the same idea about this.
I drew up a quick proposal and thought to wait and post it only if this all got some follow-up (again), and since it does, here it is:
I think we should not underestimate a user.
I would think that almost anybody using MusicBee and going to the converter settings panel will understand that mp3 is by definition lossy, and probably also that flac is by definition lossless.
A user going there will be looking to change the quality/file size, and will understand that usually those to are inverse-related.
Suggesting that there exists something specific as a 'portable' setting is in my opinion incorrect, and dumbs things down.
So I would suggest keeping the wordings as less subjective as possible, without being too technical. That can be quite simple:
for mp3 and all other lossy codecs:
- low quality (smallest)
- standard quality (medium)
- high quality (larger)
- maximum quality (largest)
For flac there are currently two presets available and I think it can stay that way.
I strongly believe there is no sensible defendable argument to deviate from the default -5 setting.
But some users who believe differently and think they know what they are doing should probably be allowed to have a secondary preset. So then we would have these two:
- default (optimal)
- custom
I am personally not very acquinted with (or interested in) Alac, WavPack, Tak etc.
Perhaps other members have some suggestions for those.