Worth it to convert Mp3s to WMAs ?

[powerMarkymark]

Question in title.

Is the space saved worth it?

Any loss in quality?

Any difficulty burning to CDs after if so desired?

What is your experience.

TIA

Mark

 

[Sunner]

If anything, re-rip from CD.
Im ripping a bunch of my CD's to Ogg files even though I already have mp3's, though my primary concern is sound quality, but converting from mp3->Ogg/WMA will only be bad for quality, though it might save you some space.

But really, unless you're really tight on space, don't do it.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Big loss in quality compared to re-ripping directly from CDs (which you apparently don't have) -- sound was already degraded by first lossy compression, re-encoding to WMA will lose even more information.

This is similar to the naive folks who take a 128 kbps MP3 and re-enocde it at 192 or even 320 thinking it will magically get better, when it will in fact get worse. Lossy compression means that information is gone forever, there's no way to get it back. Each new encoding throws away more of the original information.

 

[Shagga]

Originally posted by: powerMarkymark
Question in title.

Is the space saved worth it?

Any loss in quality?

Any difficulty burning to CDs after if so desired?

What is your experience.

TIA

Mark

The saving is good only if your tight for space I suppose. You will get more tracks on a CD though.
MS say that to encode WMA files at 64kbps will produce near CD quality. Equivalent to 128kbps MP3's.
Nero Burning Rom has a plugin to convert/burn WMA files just like MP3's on the fly.
I particularly like the way that when you create WMA files using WMP that providing you have the original CD and are online all the TAGS are updated at the time of conversion.

🙂