Converting high-quality OGG to LAME mp3?

[mineral]

I have a compression question...If I convert an OGG Vorbis VBR (350 avg bitrate) file to an alt-preset standard (200+ avg bitrate) MP3 is that considered a transcode? How much quality would I be losing?

My whole collection is in aps mp3 but my friend recently burned some cds with these huge .ogg files and was wondering if it was worth it to encode it to mp3. Thanks for any help. :smile2:

[ChristinaS]

Re: Converting high-quality OGG to LAME mp3?

It's a lossy to lossy conversion, so it is transcoding.

You would experience a slight loss of quality (but not necessarily noticeable)even if you encoded to an mp3 with the same bitrate as the original OGG file. In your case you want to encode to a lower bitrate, almost half of the original, so that of course means a bigger loss of quality, roughly proportional to the lowering of the bitrate.

The mp3 you get will be only slightly lower quality than if you had converted that from an audio cd or a wave directly.

How bad will it be? Probably not very noticeable in fact. A bitrate of 200 kbps is high enough to qualify as cd quality (or near cd-quality). But keep in mind that you cannot recover the loss, so don't get rid of the originals if you ever feel you want to regain the lost quality for any reason.

[neilthecellist]

Re: Converting high-quality OGG to LAME mp3?

If you listen to a collection of music on say, a portable player, that HAS to be in mp3 format, then, yes, go for the conversion-transcoding.

BUT if youo're just gonna be listening to music on your computer, or on a portable player that supports Ogg Vorbis, then just keep those Ogg Vorbis files intact, don't covert them, in other words, let them be.

[Spoon]

Re: Converting high-quality OGG to LAME mp3?

With such high bitrates I dont think you would hear any difference (than going from cd >> mp3).

[gameplaya15143]

Re: Converting high-quality OGG to LAME mp3?

you wont notice any difference unless you can hear frequencies of 19+ khz

lame alt preset standard has a lowpass at around 18.7khz
vorbis at that bitrate will effectly have no lowpass