mp3 to ogg conversion

[Machete]

Hi!

I'm interested in converting my collection of mp3s to the ogg format. After looking around for some good doc on how to do this, I figured out that I may be first in line (or at least near the front of the line and inclined to document). My half-ass, no-website way of doing this will be to start a discussion here at file-trading ground-zero.

Here's my plan for the first attempt. Assume I'm converting mp3s that I'm fairly certain I can't get from the original source in ogg format.

Okay, both formats are lossy, so I'll need to convert to a much higher bitrate. I'll go double the bitrate for 160 and below, and simply go to 256 for anything above there.

I'll be using DBPowerAmp, which supports the latest Ogg Vorbis codec. I'll convert a few files and report them here. Oh, and I'm using Freeamp as my player.

Any input would be appreciated ...

[BloodySabbath]

Originally posted by Machete
Okay, both formats are lossy, so I'll need to convert to a much higher bitrate. I'll go double the bitrate for 160 and below, and simply go to 256 for anything above there.

I dont understand the logic in that. If you have an mp3 at 128kbps and you convert it to ogg at 256, you dont gain any quality, but do increase the file size.
Tell me if I'm wrong, but that seems rather counterproductive.

[Machete]

Well,
the idea is to minimze the loss since both are lossy. A 128 Ogg of a 128 mp3 represents additional loss of data. So by converting to a higher bitrate, I'm minimizing the loss as opposed to gaining any increase in quality.

Which brings me to the first update:

My first conversion was 128 mp3 Lame to 256 ogg Vorbis. I'm concerned with two things: size and reasonable sound quality (as opposed to insanely high fidelity only audiophiles can detect on tru-fi systems). The second one is totally subjective, so feel free to flame me. The audio data (time, channels, etc.) isn't significantly relevant for these tests, so I'll be omitting them.

mp3 size (128,Lame): 2,908,160 bytes
ogg size (256,Vorbis,VBR): 7,007,446 bytes
quality: no discernable degradation.

Ack. 256 yielded a good sound, but the size is extremely large (as expected), so I'll run a few more converts for 160, 192, and 224.

[papadoc]

What you are doing is not a good idea.
You should never reencode a lossy format to another lossy format,
and especially from a lower bitrate to a higher bitrate.
I'm not saying it can't be done, because people do it.
But it makes for crappy sounding files.

For more info...read this thread from Hydrogenaudio.
Some of the answers are from the programmers who develop
ogg vorbis and mp3 compressors.

And there are allot of other threads there dealing with this issue,
that you can explore..
Beleive me when I tell you, these people know what they're talking about.

Hope this helps.

[Rickio]

Here is a good tool to encodge your mp3's to oog

http://www.inf.ufpr.br/~rja00/

xcLAME:
John33 finished working on xcLAME (pronnounced exclaim), a fully integrated ogg/mp3/wav encoder and transcoder.

[GimmeFire]

What you are trying to do is just stupid. Bitrates like 160 are not arbitrary numbers, they are a measure of how much information is in the file. In this example there are 160,000 bits of info about the song every second. If you encode to a higher bitrate, such as 256, no matter what codec you use, you can not have any more information than that 160kbit/sec. What you will end up with is a song with quality less than your original mp3 (because ogg encoding will take some info away also), but it will be much larger than it needs to be. If you have the original cd, rip that and encode it, but please don't encode mp3s to ogg. You'll end up with crappy quality oggs, which will give the entire format a bad name.