Mp3 to Wav

[RoyalBishop]

Anyone know if im going to lose alot of quality or if the quality can be recovered from mp3 196kbs or 256kbs back flac or wav. Alot of my music is mp3 but I just bought some sweet speakers and I want the best quality.

 

[legoman666]

recover quality? lol no. The quality disappeared the moment you converted the source to mp3. Nothing you do will bring it back short of reripping.

 

[Deeko]

no...once that data is lost, its gone. you'll just get a REALLY BIG file that sounds like an mp3.

 

[destrekor]

Originally posted by: RoyalBishop
Anyone know if im going to lose alot of quality or if the quality can be recovered from mp3 196kbs or 256kbs back flac or wav. Alot of my music is mp3 but I just bought some sweet speakers and I want the best quality.

once you compress the audio in mp3 format, the damage is done, so to speak.
sorry

 

[BigJ]

It's already degraded. You're just going to have a larger file with the same quality.

 

[Ika]

You can't recover the quality you've already lost through MP3 compression. Converting from MP3 to WAV will just increase the filesize; the sound quality won't change.

If, however, you still have the source of the music (FLAC, vinyl, CD, SACD, etc etc etc), then it's a good idea to convert to FLAC (which is a lossless format, but saves some space compared to WAV).

 

[RoyalBishop]

Damn, I will have to rip my collection agian. Thanks!

 

[George P Burdell]

You can't put together a broken vase back together.

 

[RoyalBishop]

Originally posted by: George P Burdell
You can't put together a broken vase back together.

Haha true. On the other hand if I had to dl a cd that I dont have anymore, Is the lossless cds on usenet the same if I rip a cd of mine to lossless, quality wise that is.

 

[TruePaige]

Originally posted by: RoyalBishop

Originally posted by: George P Burdell
You can't put together a broken vase back together.

Haha true. On the other hand if I had to dl a cd that I dont have anymore, Is the lossless cds on usenet the same if I rip a cd of mine to lossless, quality wise that is.

We don't talk about piracy here.

 

[NanoStuff]

It could potentially increase sound quality by running it through a specific decoder that you may prefer over the one in your MP3 player, or you may want to run it through an effect, which would work with WAVs natively, not MP3s. But for the most part, no, the sound is irrecoverably lost.

It is in theory technically possible to restore the sound not to identical pre-encoding levels but to a point that is perhaps comparable to, or otherwise exceeding the sound quality of the original source. This would be done by complex timbral and other analysis, on many different levels. An artificial intelligence in effect. Even though there are processes available now that attempt recovery of audio compression, any justified job of it is out of scope for technology for the time being.

 

[RoyalBishop]

Originally posted by: NanoStuff
It could potentially increase sound quality by running it through a specific decoder that you may prefer over the one in your MP3 player, or you may want to run it through an effect, which would work with WAVs natively, not MP3s. But for the most part, no, the sound is irrecoverably lost.

It is in theory technically possible to restore the sound not to identical pre-encoding levels but to a point that is perhaps comparable to, or otherwise exceeding the sound quality of the original source. This would be done by complex timbral and other analysis, on many different levels. An artificial intelligence in effect. Even though there are processes available now that attempt recovery of audio compression, any justified job of it is out of scope for technology for the time being.

Thanks for the info

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: NanoStuff
It could potentially increase sound quality by running it through a specific decoder that you may prefer over the one in your MP3 player, or you may want to run it through an effect, which would work with WAVs natively, not MP3s. But for the most part, no, the sound is irrecoverably lost.

It is in theory technically possible to restore the sound not to identical pre-encoding levels but to a point that is perhaps comparable to, or otherwise exceeding the sound quality of the original source. This would be done by complex timbral and other analysis, on many different levels. An artificial intelligence in effect. Even though there are processes available now that attempt recovery of audio compression, any justified job of it is out of scope for technology for the time being.

In other words, re-rip the CDs.

If you've got the space and want the rips to be identical to the CD, I'd suggest FLAC. I use CDEX. My commandline:
-8 -m -e -p %1 -V -f --replay-gain -T Artist="%a" -T Album="%b" -T Title="%t" -T Date="%y" -T Genre="%g" -T Tracknumber="%tn" -o "%2"

I don't know if it yields the best compression - I don't remember what "-m, -e, or -p" do anymore. The replay-gain is a good thing, as it evens out the volume as you go from song to song - no more of the problem of playing a disc from 1990 that's really quiet, so you turn up the volume, then to switch to something from 2005 that's had its volume pushed beyond the specified limits of CDs, and blast out your eardrums.
The replay-gain, when played with a decoder that supports it (I prefer FLAC Decoder v1.1.2, the newer versions did away with the nifty volume sliders), will eliminate this problem.

The other arguments pass tag info from CDEX to the encoder.