How to create crisper sounds/cd quality music?

aye.
if you want your stuff played out on radio and stuff, your best bet is to encode it at 320kbps. 192kbps and 256kbps are ok for playing out but don’t encode your stuff at 128, it’s not good enough now a days at all.

Just to clarify:
Bit Rate – the number of bits used per unit of time to represent a continuous medium (in this case a digital representation of a soundwave)

Sample Rate – (sampling rate or sample frequence) defines the number of samples per second taken from a continuous signal to make a digital signal. For audio this is typically taken in Hertz (cycles per second).

The typical sample rate for music is 44.1kHz (although people will sample at different frequencies but for different reasons so just stick to 44.1)

the term "depth" is used incorrectly in this instance.

Essentially though, the main make or break point is when you’re doing the mix down/mastering of your tracks. nothing to do with bit depth but more sample rate.

Also if you don’t want to lose that much quality in a cd. don’t burn to mp3. Yes, it’s easier to get out to people quicker etc, but think about an audio cd you’d buy from a store…the audio on that isn’t mp3 it’s likely to be high quality WAV or similar. so using something like CD Architect would be a good idea

the short answer is there’s no easy way to get ‘professional’ sounding tracks. It’s gonna take a bit of research, seriously, read everything you can on production, compressing, EQing, frequency ranges, sidechaining, gating, modulation effects and what each one sounds like. If it was as simple as changing the sample rate everyone would be doing it!
If you’re already happy with the quality of your mixes and they sound great on any system then only if you HAVE to encode to mp3 do so at the highest possible rate
Hope that helps

Well I always take a couple slugs of the ol whitelightning before I start any of my mixes. Cleans my ears out real good. I record all the music for my band The Shine Boys.

After a good mix-down-compression/limiting, EQing, and normalizing will punch up and boost the audio quality, if done right.