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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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