What do u mean downloading music? Do u mean through a stream and ur listening to it? Or do u mean when U are ripping like songs of a cd to ur hard drive?
In either way...a higher bit rate is better...
For streaming music the higher the bitrate the better the quality. Usually higher bitrates are for faster connections because they can handle the higher amount of data.
For rippin songs...bit rate around 128kbits is usually good enough. It really depends on what quality it was initially recorded at. U can't go from 64kbits to 128kbits....there will be no improvement there. So U need to take a look at the orginally source.
Hopefully that helps a little...please correct me if i'm wrong. GOOD LUCK! [

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