| SCMPX is probably the best MPEG audio encoder/decoder around. This is an accomplishment, considering that the program is very small, and absolutely free. Personally, I use it when making desktop themes, because it can compress a wav file down to mp3 size, while still remaining a wav. It helps keep the file size of your overall theme down to a respectable girth. Though I'm not much of a technology-oriented person, I did find some information about it on (oddly enough) it's download page @ http://www.sonicspot.com/scmpx/scmpx.html
For those of you who are too lazy to go there, here are the features it supports:
- High quality, realtime playback of MPEG audio
- Decoding (MPx -> WAV)
- Encoding (WAV -> MPx) (layer I, II or III; stereo, joint stereo, 32-320 kbps constant or variable)
- MPEG SPLIT (MPG -> MPA) (*Video CD is not supported.)
- High quality re-sampling (WAV -> WAV)
- ID3 tag support
- M3U playlist support
- Small window uses little desktop space (also provides a tiny "Window Shade" mode)
SCMPX is a 343KB download (zipped), and is compatible with Windows 95/98/NT and all sound cards that support 16 bit output. | 
