MP3 Recompression

May 31st, 2005 - 20:26 | 5 comments

Back in yonder days when I started copying all my CDs to the computer, I decided to maximize the quality by encoding them at 320kbps. Teeny bit of overkill there. Is it reasonable to try to recompress them to a lower bitrate? Or will that lower the sound quality too much? Admittedly I could just try it, but I thought I’d ask instead

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5 Responses to “MP3 Recompression”

1 Ben May 31st, 2005 at 9:01 pm

I think you’ll probably get away with it okay. Re-encoding to 128kbps - as I do for my mp3 player - does produce some artifacts though.

For ripping CDs, I find the r3mix presets (I think there’s an archive one?) that lame comes with encode nicely. It’s VBR too, so most things end up at ~200kbps, and it’s still very hard to hear a difference between that and the source CD.
(That’s not to say it isn’t there, but it’s only a small difference.)

For actually getting a perfect copy of a CD with lossless compression, I found that Flac worked well (giving about 40% compression I /think/). I know you don’t want to do that, but I thought I’d just mention it
2 Bedsit Bomber May 31st, 2005 at 9:12 pm

I wouldn’t take them down to 128kbps, as the thing is that you’ll have run the original file through two ‘lossy’ processes, and so the sound should be inferior to one that was done at 128 originally. 192 would be better. I don’t know whether some codecs/convertors are better than others - I just trust iTunes.
3 Andrew Jun 1st, 2005 at 12:44 pm

Funky - may give it a go at some point. I have 5gb free on my iPod, which is plenty(!), but at some point I may want a little more so shall bear this in mind. Thanks!
4 CapJack Sep 5th, 2005 at 9:03 pm

Use my WinMP3Shrink + Lame

Download on my site (click on “t
5 Andrew Sep 5th, 2005 at 10:40 pm

Looks interesting…thanks for the link!

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