|
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?
Or If you can't be bothered to answer my other questions directly-
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!!!
|
