does anyone know of a program that can automatically take a mp3 riped at lets say 128 and decompress and then re-rip at 256? I know plenty can.. but I am looking for one that will do it on a large scale basis.. the majority of my mp3's have been ripped at 128 and I would like them higher.. any ideas?

bboyd
MKI #301

Once your tunes have been compressed, any "information" in the waveform which would have been kept had you done it at 256k originally is lost.

C'mon, if you could rip at 128 and get 256 quality, why would anyone ever rip at 256? As a logical extension, you'd be able to rip at 32k and still get CD quality, and we'd be able to sell 6Gb empegs as holding 4000 tracks :)

Hugo

I had heard that you could decompress the mp3 back to wav and then re-rip it at what ever compression you wanted.. didnt know this wasnt true

bboyd
MKI #301

You can, but it'll sound no better than it did originally. It may actually sound worse, as you'll probably get more artifacts. It will, however, take up more space.

Programs that offer the "resampling" feature are designed for downconverting (eg, 128k->64k) of mp3's to fit onto small devices like flash-based walkmans. You're loosing quality there as a tradeoff for fitting more on the device.

Hugo

ahh ok.. I knew about the resampling and the downsizing.. but I thought that even if you had ripped something at say 63 when you uncompressed it regained its original state (guess I thought it was somewhat like a zip file).. Thanks for the extra bit of knowledge that I now have Hugo :)

bboyd
MKI #301

I generally agree that re-sampling a 128K mp3 at 256K is silly and pointless with one caveat: if the re-mp3 software has any sort of filtering, it may be able to get rid of noise in the original file. Overall quality will be technically worse, but subjective quality might be better. (Of course, you could still just resample right back to 128K in this example and get the same results.) I don't know of anything that actually does this though.