On 04/09/06, Randall R Schulz
Hi,
On Sunday 03 September 2006 23:32, suse@rio.vg wrote:
...
Has anyone here used an ogg to mp3 converter? I have a large library of mp3's, and I really don't feel like feeding all my old CD's through again. I know they exist (with a quick google search), but I'd like to know people's impression of their quality.
I can sympathize with your wish to avoid the tedium of ripping (especially dealing with the error-prone CDDB or FreeDB and manually correcting and uniformizing the tagging scheme).
I think the best recommendation if you have or can acquire the disk space is to rip to FLAC or some other lossless format (or option within a format). From there you can produce a variety of compressed formats as needed and without the degradation of transcoding from lossy encodings.
I've found 320kbps is a good compromise in quality and space between the default of 112 or 128 kbps, which sounds lousy on a proper soundsystem (generally the only listening environment i use ATM) and lossless compression such as flac. It's also helpful since, though I try to avoid mp3's, I keep them around just in case. Jeff.