Increasing the bitrate won't make the quality better. Once it's dumbed down, increasing it will only make the file size bigger. Reducing the bitrate will save space, while of course reducing the quality. And CD quality is generally 128kbps, so if it's a CD rip, much more than that is wasted space. I don't have a recommendation as far as software. If I do convert a CD, I use audiograbber. I use electronic cosmo's mpx encoder, but it's not great. It does the job.