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Hmmm - all of the tracks I have requested have had to be encoded by them at my specified rates - usually VBR. For some it means I have to wait up to a week, but the quality is uniformly excellent!

It has been like that for ages. They call it Online Encoding and transcode on the fly for you. I've never had to wait a week though, the most was a couple of hours. I can't find the upload system at the moment but they used to give you download credit by submitting albums that were requested. The compression system they wanted when I last looked at it was 320kbps MP3