The Poojer Posted August 4, 2009 Share Posted August 4, 2009 I understand that Flac and SHN files are considered lossless files and wav and mp3 are considered lossy. Question is, if you have an mp3 file, is all the data contained in that compressed file? meaning, can you encode an mp3 eventually into a flac and have that one time mp3 file now be considered a lossless file? or is converting mp3 to flac or shn a big waste of time? just curious....thanks in advance. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Assquatch Posted August 4, 2009 Share Posted August 4, 2009 Big waste of time. I would think that if your MP3 is sampled at 192 kbps for example, the data between each sampled bit is gone forever. Then again I never understood how police can "enhance" low resolution photos to show more detail (license plates form surveillance cameras for example). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Poojer Posted August 4, 2009 Author Share Posted August 4, 2009 i was just coming back to reply to my own post with a big never mind....i wasn't sure if the compressed mp3 files still contained all the information, and could be extracted by encoding to a less compressed file, ie shn or flac.....i guess not, once it goes mp3 it erases alot of that information deemed 'least important' to the makeup of the file....oh well....good to know.... ...that said, i had shn files which i wanted to convert to flac...i decoded shn to wav then encoded wav to flac....i am pretty sure that that chain kept the lossless files even going to wav....hope i am right....not that my ear can detect the subtle differences, and i really am not planning on trading the files Yes, you can convert MP3 files into any other format that you can find software for. But because MP3s are created with lossy compression, the information they contain about the music is not a perfect copy of the original. So you would be working from an imperfect source. Even if the format you were converting to allowed better audio quality than MP3, your converted files would not be able to make use of this extra quality, because you would be working from an MP3 file. Conversion and compression can only ever make quality stay the same or get worse; they can never make quality improve. The only way to get more purity would be to delete all your MP3 files and start all over again, creating new files from the original audio source, be it CD or vinyl or whatever. Keeping an archive of your music in a lossless audio format would mean that you could batch-process those lossless files to produce a collection of music files in lossy format suitable for portable players. Using a lossless audio file is as good as using the actual source; but creating audio files automatically (using suitable software) from an entire archive of existing lossless audio files is a lot quicker than copying from the original source (e.g. ripping from CD) one source at a time. Big waste of time. I would think that if your MP3 is sampled at 192 kbps for example, the data between each sampled bit is gone forever. Then again I never understood how police can "enhance" low resolution photos to show more detail (license plates form surveillance cameras for example). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts