Mp3 Converter

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jesica
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Mp3 Converter

#1 Post by jesica » Sat Sep 16, 2006 3:01 am

When converting an mp3 to wav to put on CD for listening in the car I lose a lot of sound quality - always sounds very muffled, currently use free version of wavpad to convert the sound file and Nero to burn onto CD - anyone any advice on how to improve sound quality? Thanks...

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CafeSavoy
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Re: Mp3 Converter

#2 Post by CafeSavoy » Sat Sep 16, 2006 9:35 am

jesica wrote:When converting an mp3 to wav to put on CD for listening in the car I lose a lot of sound quality - always sounds very muffled, currently use free version of wavpad to convert the sound file and Nero to burn onto CD - anyone any advice on how to improve sound quality? Thanks...
First you need to consider the bit rate of the mp3, if it is very low you will get bad results. Second, you don't have to convert the mp3 to wave to burn with nero.

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trev
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#3 Post by trev » Sat Sep 16, 2006 9:39 am

The MP3 should sound the same after you have converted it to a WAV and then burned it to a CD.

Unless you really need it to be a WAV file (for editing?) then I would use something like iTunes to burn the MP3 straight to CD (iTunes does the conversion for you, you just need to select in the Preferences whether you want an 'audio cd' or an 'mp3 CD')

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#4 Post by Katie » Tue Sep 19, 2006 4:38 am

You can also use FlexiMusic Audio Editor, but if you convert the Wav to Mp3 and back many times, with any software it looses quality.

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tornredcarpet
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#5 Post by tornredcarpet » Mon Oct 02, 2006 2:46 pm

You can try encoding stuff into lossless audio codecs like APE (monkey audio, my favorite), FLAC, or whatever other stuff is out there.
I occasionally run into places with nothing but a CD player, so until I get a laptop of my own, I have to burn a lot of CDs, and I'd rather not carry around a collection worth thousands of dollars when I can just burn copies directly from my library.

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GemZombie
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#6 Post by GemZombie » Tue Oct 03, 2006 4:13 am

Lossless still isn't optimal for space issues for many people. The best lossless will get you is a 50% savings of space version the 60-80% increase with best mp3 settings.

The bitrate is of course the most important thing with MP3, but also consider the actual encoder you use. Anything based on the original Fraunhofer encoder will create lower quality than something that use the "LAME" encoder (which is what I recommend). There is a noticable difference.

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tornredcarpet
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#7 Post by tornredcarpet » Tue Oct 03, 2006 4:52 am

Be also aware that many lossless and hi-fidelity formats also require a lot of processing power.

I should also note that a bitrate of 240kbps and up for the LAME codec has virtually perfect transparency.
That's an 83% compression rate (almost 6 times smaller) compared to monkey audio's (fast compression) ratio of 2.71 times smaller or if you want to be resource hog, using extra high compression gets it to ~238kbps, actually smaller than mp3, but with dramatically greater resource usage.
Lossless formats are really only useful for people who frequently transcode or require multiple formats.

Addenum: (mind you, it's still perfectly feasible on modern processors with a clock speed of >1GHz and >512MB of RAM).
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#8 Post by Toon Town Dave » Tue Oct 03, 2006 4:51 pm

I'm not sure I'd agree tornredcarpet that loss-less formats take more processing power. If files are already LPCM, the CPU doesn't need to do anything but push bytes from disc to the sound device, just like playing a CD. There is no data conversion. "wave files" are usually just PCM with a wav header describing the data and it's format.

MP3 or any compressed format will require conversion back to something the sound device understands. That will require CPU.



The simple but long answer to jesica's question is MP3's tosses out part of the music that is probably not as important as the parts it keeps. As Rayned (cafesavoy) mentioned, the bit rate affects the quality; the higher the bit rate, the less gets tossed.

Going to a wav file (or CD) from MP3 is just taking what's left in the MP3 and turning it into the format uncompressed format for CDs. The CD sound quality should be the same as the MP3 but never better, all other things being equal (what trev said). Think of this as dumping your small change in the charity box at the store ... once it's gone, you can't get it back.

If the CD sounds worse in your car than the MP3 on your computer, it could be the computer is just better than the sound system in your car. Try playing the CD in your computer.

I'd suspect the speakers in your car are just low quality or are not optimized for the kind of music you're playing. Most people these days play thump-thump music in their car so stock sound systems are made for that, not jazz.

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Lawrence
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#9 Post by Lawrence » Sat Nov 11, 2006 5:52 pm

Toon Town Dave wrote:If the CD sounds worse in your car than the MP3 on your computer, it could be the computer is just better than the sound system in your car. Try playing the CD in your computer.
It could also be that the car stereo is actually better than the computer sound card, and thus the car stereo reveals deficiencies in the source that the computer sound card doesn't reveal or highlight when playing the MP3. Not sure if that is what is happening, here, but it is something to consider....
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