Any advice?

[cplaya177]

I have a moderate library of around 7,000 songs. Over half started out as mp3s burnt from WMP a long time ago. I had some generic mp3 players but after some �customer support experiences� with creative, I took advantage of my service plan and got an iPod. The switch to iTunes was a fun change for a while. After many painful experiences with iTunes not updating id3 tags, I got rid of it and went with Anapod Explorer. With 3ivx codecs I can play m4as in WMP11 and also experiment with the dBpoweramp player. Right now, due to the wonderful iTunes taking over my library some time ago, over 5000 songs are in m4a format. I would love to put those back to mp3 for the future if I do ever change portable players. I have all the codecs and this isn't really a question of how, but should I?

I know a lot of quality is lost in a lossy to lossy conversion. The bit-rate is almost always 192 or higher and so many more organization software supports strictly mp3s, especially when reading id3 tags.

So what it all comes down to, is it worth it in your opinion? Any feedback is greatly appreciated.

[Spoon]

Re: Any advice?

I wouldn't say alot of quality would be lost 192Kbps >> 192Kbps, but repeatadly doing it again and again is not best.

If you have the time, re-rip to lossless and transcode when uploading to the ipod.

[cplaya177]

Re: Any advice?

Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately I do not have the time to re-rip all of my CDs :-( I wish I knew those years ago that ripping to lossless was the way to go, but I'm not even sure I had the hard drive space back then. Glad to know its not a big loss, I think I will send them all to mp3.

Thanks again!

[cplaya177]

Re: Any advice?

More problems. :cry:

I used the dBpowerAMP to Arrange my music (power pack add-on) and afterwords I had to go through and edit a good portion of my id3 tags. Not a problem but in the process I noticed a good hundred or so songs were missing. Granted this is a library of 6000+ songs but it would be a few tracks out of an album. The entire thing baffled me since even songs that lost their id3 tags were in the right folder, I cannot find these songs. Luckily I have a back up of my entire library on an iPod and can bring some of these songs up but can anyone give me insight on where these songs may have gone, or if not, just bringing it to your attention.

In hindsight, some (but definitely not all) may have been lost in a m4a -> mp3 conversion (delete source after), but I know for a fact some of these songs were mp3 to start with.

[Wayne]

Re: Any advice?

If these missing files were without certain tag information (e.g. Artist or Album) they may have been moved to the root level folder.

How have you organised your music files?

[LtData]

Re: Any advice?

The "Delete source files" option has caused nothing but headaches for people. It is normally recommended that you avoid this option whenever possible.

[cplaya177]

Re: Any advice?

Nothing in the root level and the tagless files (from the beginning) were put in a untitled album folder. There were only 6 of those. I'm guessing somehow the delete source files must have attacked them...I knew it was a risk but I've never had a problem with it in the past before.

[cplaya177]

Re: Any advice?

Update!

Finally got around to pulling the files from backup and noticed a strange pattern. On Artists that start with S, the songs with track 1-6 or 1-7 were deleted without being converted. I may try to test this later once I have all the files back and organized but thats been a scary similarity.

edit: turns out to be any artists after s. I know I did the conversion in two parts. Seems like an isolated incident. Curious to what happened though.