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Derek
10-05-2003, 05:00 AM
Does anyone already know of a program that will do mp3-to-ogg batch conversion?
yosik
10-05-2003, 06:55 AM
Derek,
dbpoweramp does it. check other posts for detail. It is a GREAT tool!
Yossi
Derek
10-05-2003, 07:53 AM
Thanx Yossi :) The end of that post wasnt there when i posted this [i think]
John-oh
10-05-2003, 09:02 AM
I notice vorbis.com don't recommend converting MP3s to Ogg ( assuming you have a choice ), as they say converting one lossy format to another degrades quality. Anyone had problems with this ?
eric_darling
10-05-2003, 10:04 AM
Yes, John. It's unadvisable. You mileage will vary depending on the original MP3 quality, but it's still recompressing a previously compressed file via a completely separate algorithm. Anytime you do that, you're asking for problems. The old rule always applies: garbage in - garbage out. Usually worse stinking garbage too. :)
Lorne
10-05-2003, 12:49 PM
Yep, good old GIGOUWSGT.
yosik
10-06-2003, 02:19 PM
I know it would sound stupid, but it does work:
convert your mp3 to uncompressed wav and then convert them again to ogg. Wht you gain is the fact that the conversion algorithm doesn't try to "jump" from one for amt to another. Results vary, based on compression of source, but it can work.
Yossi
Lorne
10-06-2003, 02:33 PM
Yes, that will get you an ogg file...but the quality will be a little bit less than the mp3.

The reason for this is that MP3 and Ogg are both lossy formats...basically, they use super-complicated algorithms that throw away sound information that we either can't hear or can't hear "as much." (The lower the quality setting, the more stuff is thrown away, until you can hear the difference in quality.)

These algorithms analyze the audio data to pick which parts can be thrown out with the least impact on the end result. An MP3 file already has tons of data thrown out in this way...so when you turn around and convert an MP3 file to Ogg Vorbis format, which uses a totally different algorithm, there isn't very much data left to analyze. All the data that was important to the algorithms has already been stripped away.

It will work, and to many people's ears it won't sound bad at all (especially if the source MP3 was encoded at a really high bitrate like 320 kbps). But in order to get a .ogg file that sounds as good or better than the MP3, you need to start from the original sound data.