Hell everyone.

For several reasons that are not important, I am currently ripping my collection to OGG.
Previously I only had some albums ripped, because for the rest I still listened to music in my car player or CD player (yeah old school I know).

Now, for the sake of having a few discs laying around to carry my whole collection everywhere, I decided to give a go to a massive ripping job. And OGG is my selected format.

I know its crazy that, I wanna backup my collection but I'm not doing it on a lossless format like FLAC or something crazy like WAV.

But to my ears OGG -q6 is the same as CD quality and that's all that matters. I'm not one of those "I bought these 3 billion dollars headphones and god!! I can hear an new universe of sounds" people. For me that's placebo but everybody is entitled to waste their money the they want .

So now that we are leaving the "why would you backup your stuff on OGG -q6?? Are you insane!!??" question that might pop up in your heads. We are left with this.
Some of my CDs just didn't make it
I knew the sooner I started the better but I as lazy and unfortunately some of my CDs, specially some from a crazy long classic music collection, are almost unreadable. I tried a lot of things but they are way too scratched. Boomer.
Obviously this is not a thread on how to recover data.

Some of these CDs are just gone forever. But the good news is that some of them are amongst the ones I ripped before, to MP3 (128 or 192 kbps).

So, I don't wanna have OGGs and MP3 co-existing. I wanna kill all my MP3s. I was wondering if it was possible at all to encode those MP3s into OGGs (transconding), without loosing quality?
Like images. You could convert a JPEG to BMP without losing quality at all, wondering why the same can't happen in music files?

Because, from what I have seen, the only recommended transcoding is say, a 10 GB FLAC to 192 kbps MP3, but that is a very "easy question" because it almost obvious that transcoding from lossless to lossy would be the same as ripping a CD (or so I think).

But the deal is, if I wanted to take those 128/192 kbps MP3s that I cannot get in any other way (unless I buy the CDs again) to OGG -q6, is there anything that can be done at all not to lose quality, or introducing artifacts or something? I don't care about filesizes and such, just a "clean" MP3-2-OGG conversion.

Thanks!!!

That would be like decoding your MP3 to Wav, but that's not what you want, right?

Is there any real reason not to keep the original MP3s? Really, the only way to transcode to ogg is to decode the MP3 to wav, and encode that as ogg. Any program like foobar2000 which doesn't involve the .wav intermediate is just doing it internally, you'll get identical results.

I cannot think of any situation where an MP3 would not play, when an ogg file would, and therefore recommend that you keep the original MP3, as the quality loss isn't worth it just for the sake of having a 'clean' music collection, especially considering these are the only copies you have of your cds.

Simple answer... No, you cant transcode from one lossy format to another without losing more quality


slightly more in depth answer...

lossy encoders like ogg and mp3 work by discarding information. Your mp3's have had sound information discarded, by converting to ogg you will be discarding even more information.

However that said, before I knew this, I used to be in your situation as I once had wma's in my collection of mp3's I transcoded them into mp3 and didn't notice a drop in sound quality. Mind you I didnt go looking for quality loss.

Since your not the type to care to much about the best audio quality in the world i would suggest you transcode a few files and see if they sound acceptable. Maybe you will feel the benifit have having only 1 format in your collection outweighs the quality loss you will get.

I dont transcode lossy to lossy anymore because I want the best sound I can get from my files. So I leave my songs in the original formats i get them.

A lil test you could try is pick one of your files, convert it to ogg, convert it back to mp3, convert it back to ogg, see how many times it takes you to notice the quality loss.. Thats just a suggestion if you wanted to look at the effects of transcoding with a magnifying glass.



Or you could use a program like dBpoweramp.. thats what I used once upon a time.

Thanks a lot for your answers guys.
Guess I'll give this one some thought before deciding.

I will try your suggestion vader897

I wouldn't do it . 192k may not be enough enough for transcoding and definately not 128 k .. but that is my subjective experience. You could try a few tracks just to make sure it ok for you. I'd also add a comment tag: "Transcoded from mp3.." If you don't do it and hear something wrong you won't know what's what anymore and could develop paranoia . That is bad and could lead you to rip all your collection again.

And how would this produce different results? Unless dBpoweramp has some sort of dedicated mp3->ogg transcoder, it would still be converting the mp3 to 16bit PCM before encoding it as ogg.

Download the CDs that don't play any more (so long as it's legal in your country, of course.) Even if not it's pretty justified given Philips' claim of "perfect sound forever." But I'm not condoning it where it's against the law. Is my back covered enough there?

I like your idea of adding a transcoding comment, know if there is anyway to do this automatically with Foobar trancoding tools?

You can customize any of the foobar conversion profiles by editing the preset and then changing the encoder to "custom". It shows the command used so you can add a generic "transcoded" tag command.

Short version:
- no, you cannot do it without losing quality
- mp3 is the worst format to transcode FROM. If you can hear it, is a different story however.

It has only proven to be bad when reencoding LAME V0 > LAME, but I found the same issue to a larger extent with vorbis. My impression is that LAME MP3 is adequate for a single transcode to other formats or itself, using fixed CBR / ABR 256 k or higher.

shadowking, you settled for Lame -V4, right? And this after so much encoding distress and format changing?

Yes , I concluded that V4 or V3 would be the sweet spot for me for an all-in-one audio solution (no transcoding). V2 starts to loose efficiency and I managed to abx it on nearly every sample that was a problem for V3. Then for those rare samples you have to you brute force approach to get better results and sometimes even that is not enough when abxing. On the other hand V5 is popular here and I confirm it does really well for its bitrate. I've managed to abx heaps of V5 random samples, but I admit its not a matter of fast abxing anymore and I normally do need to concentrate a bit. The V4 / V3 presets need more effort and I think normal material will be transparent or very close. I've encoded hundreds of albums with V4 3.98 and the results are very good - encountering a major showstopper is pretty rare. Avg bitrate is 158 k .. I can strech out to V3 and still achieve an economical 175 k or so. I know my approach is not popular here - most are putting on the bits while I am loosing them.

For an alternative high bitrate approach mp3 should still be considered instead of the previous MPC insane theory. For a single transcode you could still achieve adequate quality from mp3 as I explained in the previous post while still retaining the universal mp3 compatibility (those 256k mp3's will work on all players).

I am more and more convinced that transcoding is a step back even from a lossless source. Lossless will take off when it works anywhere like mp3 . Wavpack hybrid with correction file is my second favourite approach. Support is growing and if it is wide then you have one format for lossy and lossless - no transcoding. Lossywav is very promising as a vbr semi lossless alternative that will work with the lossless coders.