I have some irreplaceable Mp3 encoded 320 - 256 that need some editing. Can I decode these to a Wav...Edit them and then reencode them with Lpac and still maintain at least the 320 - 256 bitrate quality.

Second question every bit of my music when played is at different volume levels. Is there software out there that will automaticly bring my files to a set volume level with out messing up the dynamics (as in normalizer) when i burn a cd

For your first question: Yes, any lossless encoder will preserve the quality your mp3s currently have. Of course, reencoding those edited wavs back to mp3 will lower your quality some. There are some tools that let you directly edit an mp3, but are fairly limited. What do you need to do?

Second question: Check out the replaygain website at replaygain.org. There's implementataions of its algorithms in wavgain, vorbisgain, and mp3gain. I don't know if there's tools for other codecs yet. (IIRC, flac will have replaygain in a future release.) I've replaygain'd my entire music collection and never looked back -- it's really, really wonderful.

lpac is lossless and so is wav files.
Therefore if you decode to wav it will be the same quality as your original mp3's.
Encoding to lpac with not make a difference in the quality compared to the wavs; so yes.



Yes, for mp3 there is mp3gain, for mpc there is replaygain and for wave there is wavgain.
Search around this forum for info and ask additional questions here if you like.

Can't you edit it with MP3directCut?

It has some nifty direct-editing functions - I.E: You don't need to decode-edit-encode. Just edit and save.

http://www.rz.uni-frankfurt.de/~pesch/

Regards

Roberto.

With Mp3 direct cut can not edit pops, noises or anything else very accurately and if your files is encoded vbr it seems to be worthless for anything I like to edit with EAC or Sonic forge in wav format you can slice or silence less than .0001 of a second. I think that is very accurate.

You can get volume normalisation plugins for most of the players that work ok.
Some only ruin dynamics until the highest peak in the song.

I have been working on one that tags the peak value into the song after you first play it, so that every time after that you know how much gain you need.