Hi. I have a large collection of MP3s, downloaded & ripped. Over the years I have used various settings for ripping, ranging from CBR128 or CBR196 Stereo in the old days, VBR128-196 St and VBR128-160 St. More recently (today!) I have learned about Joint Stereo and ABR. My last few rips have been ABR128-JS. I have been using LAME via CDex. Obviously the settings of my downloads are at the mercy of the supplier. I am running out of HDD space, and as well as deleting the music I no longer listen to, I want to reduce the size of some of my MP3s. In its most basic form, I understand MP3 encoding to be simply a process of "shaving" unnecessary information off the original file to make it smaller, where the bit-rate is simply a measure of how much information is "kept". There is no way to recreate this lost information, it simply goes unnoticed to the human ear (="lossy"). If you wanna skip to the end go ahead... but I would appreciate an explanation rather than just an answer... Theoretical question: If I was to convert a CBR128 Stereo MP3 to a "CD quality" WAV file, and then convert back, would I end up with the same MP3 file? Or, would the encoding process re-shave the already stripped waveform, stripping even more information thus reducing the quality? If your answer is "Yes it would reduce the quality" then would this loss in quality be significant, when compared to a change in bitrate, for example from >CBR192 to ABR128 or VBR160 to ABR 128? How about if I also changed from stereo to j-stereo? [bold]Or If you can't be bothered to answer my other questions directly-[/bold] Say I made two MP3s from the same source, [1] and [2]. [1] is ABR128 J-Stereo, [2] is at some higher bitrate, either CBR or VBR (stereo for arguement's sake). I then convert [2] to ABR128 J-S [3]. Could I tell the difference between [1] and [3]? Is there a program which could convert in one step or am I limited to the long-winded MP3>WAV>MP3 conversion? Or even better, is there a program (preferably freeware) which can inter-convert MP3s without "excessive" quality loss? Thanks for your help in advance!!!
Basically converting an MP3 to MP3 again will result in quality being lost. The same goes for converting an MP3 to WAV and then back to MP3 again. I suppose it depends on each individual to spot if the file sounds worse when tampered with. If you don't mind losing quality then there is a program called dBPowerAMP that can convert from one format to another or from one format to the same format. Here is the link = http://www.dbpoweramp.com/ IN my opinion you should re-rip the cd's you own using Exact Audio Copy (the best freeware ripper available). YOu can create high quality MP3 files using the VBR feature. Take a look at this guide and follow the steps = http://www.afterdawn.com/guides/archive/mydeneaclame.cfm
OK thanks. I have followed your guide for using EAC and I have two questions: 1) Is there any way to prevent the LAME DOS window popping up every time 2) Is there any way to stop my computer beeping during MP3 encoding?
1) The DOS window has to pop up as that is the Lame encoder doing it's job. 2) Yes Click EAC > EAC Options > General > and then untick the box which says "Beep after extraction finished"
OK thanks! Actually, you can prevent the DOS window appearing: In EAC options, Tools Tab, Click "Do not open external compressor window". I can see why this window is useful but I prefer to leave the ripping process in the background while I work or surf, popping DOS boxes and beeping is too much of a distraction! What does the --alt part of the command line do? I can't find it in the LAME help files included in the ZIP. The instructions say to just use "-preset <preset_name>"
ok I don't know if this will help you but I use a program called DietMP3 it makes the file size smaller but it takes away from the bitrate too- but on my mp3 player you can't notice with headphones. If you're concerned with quality then I'd suggest converting your mp3's to wma format- i'd hate to say I don't know crap but after playing around with the settings in dbpoweramp I got my wma files to sound just as good as a high bitrate mp3 with half the file size, hope this helps
