Yeah, the out-of-box encoders included with Linux distros in 2002 would likely not have been great. If you were lucky you might have gotten an early version of LAME. If you do the experiment again, it may be worth using either the likes of Spotify/Apple Music (okay, strictly speaking neither are mp3, but same general idea, and they'll put effort into encoding properly), or using a decent modern encoder (LAME, the Apple one, etc).
Yes, now that you mention it, it was in fact LAME. I'll try again sometime with abcde in its default settings.
By the way, I once made a GUI for abcde called abcdefg (A Better CD Encoder For Gnome) but never did anything with it - it was really just an exercise to learn the GTK libraries because Zim Wiki used them too. But I now regret not publishing it just because it had such a cool name.
