On Monday 29 January 2007, Carlos E. R. wrote:
The Monday 2007-01-29 at 19:18 -0800, Robert Smits wrote:
I'd love it if there were a way to convert already not-so-great audio files from .mp3 to .ogg without incurring further degradation, but I don't know how to do that.
AFAIK, itsn't possible. Not even in theory.
-- Cheers, Carlos E. R.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the loss involved in mp3 format was suffered in the encoding. Playback is 100% faithful to the encoded file (not the original), and nothing more is lost in playback. There should be no loss (as I understand it) in converting from mp3 to wav. So one could run the command: sox some.mp3 some.wav and expect lossless conversion, no? Now for encoding the wav into ogg, sox might not be the best choice because the maximum bitrate it can muster is 128, but there are other encoders, and perhaps 128 is enough or "not so great" audio files that Robert mentions. The question then becomes one of how much fidelity will you lose in the encoding to ogg. If some Ogg encoders offer a near perfect encoding setting, you could get close enough that you may not be able to hear the difference, even though you would know some loss had occurred. In fact, with the simple command line sox some.mp3 some.ogg (dispensing with the intermediate wav file) does a good enough job that my old ears can't detect any difference even with studio quality headphones on my decidedly non-studio quality ears. -- _____________________________________ John Andersen