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Pointless?
Authored by: react on Aug 09, '04 08:32:39PM

I really don't see the point in this script?

You're converting from a lossy format to another lossy format.....so you'll end up with a worse quality mp3 in the end than if you just stuck with the ogg vorbis file.

The only I can see for doing this is converting a ogg to mp3 to play on your iPod, but then it would be better if you just went and download a mp3 in the first place. Plus if you share your converted mp3 you're just going to be contaminating p2p with a crappy quality version.



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Pointless? I don't think so...
Authored by: dontlikehippies on Aug 09, '04 09:54:21PM

i used this script because iTunes hiccups when reading .ogg files. before this, if i wanted to convert .ogg to .mp3, i was forced to use AudioHijack Pro (and play each song all the way through). thanks!



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Pointless? I still think so...
Authored by: react on Aug 09, '04 10:59:15PM

Yeh, well that pretty much fits into my iPod reasoning, but as I said for that you would be better off grabbing a mp3 encoded from the original cd.

Converting from one lossy codec to another is not the way to go.



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Pointless? I don't think so...
Authored by: miggins on Aug 09, '04 11:54:16PM

Have you tried using the faster version? Get the latest from here: http://qtcomponents.sourceforge.net/



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Pointless?
Authored by: mrgerbek on Aug 09, '04 11:36:45PM

I agree that its not ideal, but even you point out a reason for it in your explanation of why its pointless ;)

I was looking for a way to do it, noticed that someone else had also asked how to do it, then decided to submit it as a hint instead of a reply. Except for a few malformed bits, no harm done.

Andy

---
~~~~~~~~~~
Be Green



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Pointless?
Authored by: /mecki78 on Aug 10, '04 07:05:37AM

It's not pointless at all! I make all my CDs to OGG and I buy music *legally* online in OGG format, too! Why? It sounds better and needs less space! Why should I use crappy MP3 for that?

But mobile players (unless the very expensive ones) don't play OGG. So to play them out of house, I must covert them to MP3. But this is just for the mobile player. At home I keep using the OGGs.

For a mobile player, MP3 with 128 kbit/s may even be enough, they won't sound much worse through crappy headphones and with all the street noise around me. But at home I want High Fidelity! 192 kbit/s MP3 are hardly enough, while OGG Level 5-6 (170-200 kbit/s) are usually transparent for me, even on good sound equipment.

I don't "share" the "bad" MP3s or anything, they are for my private use on mobile players or wherever I can't use OGG out of some other reason. Wherever I can, I only use OGG.

The MP3s are just cheap copies (I don't even keep them! I usually create them when I want them on my player and delete them if I replace them --- I have no IPOD and may player has only 256 MB storage for MP3s).

And trust me, I bet $1000 that you won't be able to tell the difference between

CD -> MP3 192 kbit/s
CD -> Ogg q6 -> MP3 192 kbit/s

No way!

I know losy to losy is bad, but some pictures where also stored as JPG multiple times and you still can barely see any artifacts. Same with audio. You can re-compress a MP3 to MP3 three to four times without having crap as result (of course only if the bitrate is high enough; 128 to 128 is already very bad). And OGG takes much "less" away of the music than MP3 does and since OGG adds different kind of artifacts than MP3, they don't sum up as in MP3 to MP3 re-encoding.

However, I would always choose LAME VBR (e.g. lame --preset standard) for re-encoding, as it preserves most quality.



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Pointless?
Authored by: midtoad on Jul 11, '05 08:17:04PM

the point might be that iTunes is very slow in adding .ogg files to its library, and it skips a lot when playing .ogg files if you are doing anything else at the same time (at least for my case, with the .ogg files on a remote PC on my home network; YMMV).

As for transcoding crapping out the quality, that's certainly the accepted view. But at least one individual's report suggests that he couldn't tell the difference, even with a double-blind test.



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