LAME Package Question

[Brandon J. Wandersee]

Ian Smith writes:

>  > > As a side note, transcoding MP3 to WAV---or any other lossy format to
>  > > any other loss-less format---isn't really a good idea.
>  > 
>  > Except you want to create audio CDs from MP3 files (to play
>  > them in a device that doesn't read MP3 data CDs). :-)

While this isn't an unfair point, it is a bit off-base. Transcoding
audio files and burning them to CDs is something of a dying art. ;)

>
> Urgh :)  Try using sox' spectrogram effect to visually compare original 
> .wav files to those converted back from even highest-quality .mp3s ..

Just to be clear, the fidelity of the audio won't change when going from
MP3 to WAV, as it would when going from WAV to MP3 or MP3 to another
lossy format. But the file size will explode. You'll have exponentially
larger files taking up much more space with no gain in audio fidelity or
"quality."  But there's no loss compared to the source, either. That's
why I said it wasn't really a good idea, as opposed to it being a bad
idea---under some circumstances, it's a trad-off some might be willing
to make.

Transcoding from one lossy format to another (like from MP3 to Ogg
Vorbis) is always a terrible idea.

-- 
::  Brandon J. Wandersee
::  brandon.wandersee at gmail.com
::  --------------------------------------------------
::  'The best design is as little design as possible.'
::  --- Dieter Rams ----------------------------------