I have a sony Discman with mp3 capabilites, and unforutunately I won't b able 2 upgrade it... so the only way I could play ogg or AAC on it is only if I transcode these formats into mp3...
now the big question is: how do I do that without a considerable loss of quality???
should I just use the plain nero file decoding option I have???
is there anythin special I need 2 know bout this issue?

i'm not familiar with aac or ogg... but i had the same question about MPC the other day... and basically... any time you transcode, it brings it back to wav first... so aslong as your ogg/aac files are good, there shouldn't be any problems...

you may wanna checkout dbpoweramp... it would probably be extremely useful for this...

There will be somewhat of a loss in quality, but it might be pretty agreeable if your source AAC, OGG, etc. files are of good quality to begin with.

I'd recommend if you're going to transcode to MP3, you should do it by first decoding the files to WAV with Winamp's Disk Writer plug-in, and then encoding them with RazorLame with "custom options only" selected, and
--alt-preset cbr 128 --lowpass 16
as your commandline.

http://classic.winamp.com/components/downl...mponentid=71812

It's easier this way, you can directly write to LAME mp3 with this output for Winamp
NOTE: no --alt-preset for this plugin!

If you want to encode to --alt-preset then use dbpowerAMP Music Converter
http://www.dbpoweramp.com/


Normally mp3 players have 16 kHz problem when decoding 128 kbps mp3 files.
Besides I think you will be able to listen to pre-echo with your sony discman

--alt-preset standard -b 160 -F

if VBR is supported


CBR
--alt-preset cbr 160
--alt-preset cbr 192

this could be misleading. while when you transcode your aac/ogg is converted to .wav, that .wav is exactly the same quality as the source aac/ogg, but most definately worse quality than the .wav that created the aac/ogg. So transcoding from aac/ogg to mp3 will hurt quality, how much is hard to say.

You can transcode directly using Speek's Multi Frontend.

If you need mid bitrates I'd rather use:

--alt-preset standard -Y
(If the bitrate is still too high use)
--alt-preset 128

DON'T USE CBR UNLESS YOUR HARDWARE DOESN'T SUPPORT VBR.