QUOTE(Mike Patton @ Jan 23 2006, 01:39 AM)
You have me slightly confused because I'm still a slow learning newbie. When you say I should re-rip them, you mean take all my music fresh from the CDs or can I just run the music already on my computer through EAC? If that is the case what can I do about music I have on CD-R or have downloaded? I'm guessing not much, but thanks for the help!
-And sorry for the vauge topic name, I will work on that.
I'll try to explain simpler.
By re-rip he meant to put your audio cd in the drive and encode in mp3 them once again (preferebly with EAC & Lame) but this time with different settings (the ones you want). The previous files you can delete I guess.
If you don't have the CDs and you only have the mp3s - LEAVE THEM as they are. You can only make them worse. You CAN'T make them better. If you have concern for quality, NEVER transcode from a lossy format to another lossy.
Mp3 should only be made from audio cds or lossless files WHICH have been made from an audio cd.
Once an audio track is compressed into mp3, it loses sound data. The compression throws away the uneeded data. In order to convert a mp3 file, you must first convert it into wav (MP3 -> WAV -> MP3). By converting mp3 to wav you'll neither lose nore gain quality. BUT after that, the compression to mp3 agian WILL THROW away data ONCE AGAIN. So it's BAD! This is called transcoding.
Transcoding is acceptable only if you need to reduce the size of mp3 in order to put them on a portable. Then it's OK since you'll be outside and it'll be noisy so the quality loss will not be audible.
Hope I made things clearer.