Hi all,

I'm new to the forum and I have a question regarding Sound Forge 8.0 I have a variable bit rate song I downloaded off of Amazon. The original track is said to be at 256kbps, but when I edit part of the song out in Sound Forge 8.0 and try to save the change, the bitrate goes down to 146kbps once saved.

Any ideas on how I can fix this? I also have the MP3 plug-in if that helps.

I don't have Sound Forge, but I'm sure it has some "Save As" options that allow you to change/choose the format details/attributes or to save in a different format.

Or, you can save it as an uncompressed WAV file and use another application of your choice to re-encode it to MP3.

Once you've opened and edited an MP3, it's already been decoded (decompressed) and it has to go through another lossy compression step. So, saving it as an intermediate WAV file doesn't make the overall process any more lossy.

Isn't it true though that the original MP3 is already lossy and that editing, then saving it as a lossless .wav then back to another lossy MP3 is bad as well?

There is no difference between manually creating the linear WAV file and letting soundforge do that in the background.

What j7n and I are trying to say is:

In order to edit an MP3 it must be decoded first.* The waveform you see in Sound Forge (or any other audio editor) is the decoded waveform.

When you re-save the edited file in a compressed format, it therefore must be re-compressed. There is no way to avoid the 2nd lossy encode.

You may not notice any quality loss with the 2nd encode, especially at high bitrates. (Most of the information lost during compression was already lost during the 1st compression... I was trying to explain that a little more, but it was just geting more confusing, so I deleted it... Let's just say that MP3 compression is "smart", and it trys to throw-away the least important information... It doesn't "go looking" for something new to throw-away the 2nd time.)



* There are a couple of exceptions... Some audio editors are smart-enough not to re-code if you open the file and then save it without actually editing it. And, there are some special-purpose MP3 editors that can "cut & splice" or alter the volume level without decoding the file. Anything beyond that simply can't be done without decoding first.