compressions

[shoot the puck]

I need to compress all my mp3's and was going to use ogg. but i've beenreading how the quality won't be all that great since compress the mp3's one more time. all my mp3 were recorded in 256.

what would be the best converter to go with that would give the best sound quality. I was going to use ogg at level 5. would aac be better? I don't want to reburn my discs.

[xoas]

Re: compressions

You probably know this already but you will never be able to improve your 256 kbs short of re-ripping the tracks. If/where that is not an option, consider saving your mp3 tracks (perhaps burning them to cd-rom if hard drive space is an issue).

Second, with respect to reconverting your mp3 files to a higher (more compressed) level of compression, you would be ideally better off re-ripping those tracks from source as opposed to reconverting them from mp3.

That being said, the other question is what format to rip to and at what setting. Your issues are going to be quality of sound (higher is better) vs. space (smaller file size is better). You know you want smaller files than your current 256 kbs mp3 files take up.
I think your best options are probably Ogg Vorbis at Q5 or Q6 or mp3 maybe at alt-preset-standard or maybe at 192 kbs (if you need a cbr).
Try one of the Ogg Vorbis aoTuV codecs (the b3 version can be found at Codec Central, the b4 version is in the Beta Forum-the b4 needs a later version of the basic Ogg Vorbis codec, also in the Beta Forum to properly handle tags, both aoTuV codecs require a standard Ogg Vorbis codec to read/play Ogg Vorbis files and to handle tagging), as these provide superior sound. The versions of Ogg Vorbis aoTuV with SSE will do conversions to Ogg Vorbis quickest, the aoTuiV codecs (without SSE) will also be notably faster than standard Ogg Conversions.

I would compare these to mp3 at various settings. If you end up converting from your existing mp3 files, I am not sure whether you might not have better quality results if you keep to mp3. Of course, it is always worthwhile to be looking down the road at what you might end up doing with these files. If you have or end up geting a portable device odds are far better that it will play mp3 rather than Ogg Vorbis and if you have to convert from Ogg back to mp3 you will get another degree of deterioration (although if you had backed up the mp3 files as I advised at first, this wouldn't be an issue would it? ).

I again would recommend that you try comparing a few different Ogg settings and a few mp3 settings to determine which you think would work best for you.

Best wishes,
Bill

[shoot the puck]

Re: compressions

i'm planning to keep my mp3 in my computer. I just need to convert it to use in a 1 gig sd card which just doesn't have that much space. I have over 40 gigs of mp3's which i plan to keep. I just dont want to rerip everything.

[gameplaya15143]

Re: compressions

you want to keep high quality but have the smallest possible file size, it's not too difficult, but keep in mind you will lose some quality

use ogg vorbis at quality 0 (64kbps), the default lowpass is at 15khz (way to low for my taste), which is why i use the commandline encoder with the option '--advanced-encode-option lowpass_frequency=25' which effectively moves the lowpass filter above what a 44100Hz samplerate file can do. I sugguest experimenting with different lowpass settings and see what you like.

add something like this to the newer beta vorbis codec's options.txt file:

[CLIString]
--advanced-encode-option lowpass_frequency=25

enjoy
by the way, i have converted a bunch of mp3s at 160kbps with this setting, quality is still quite good, although not as good as encoding directly from the cd