Dan Winship escribió:
Isn't ogg->mp3 going to be unpleasantly lossy?
Yes and no... Yes, because the files would be stripped once again of some frequencies, and no because they have already been stripped of much of the "redundant" frequencies. Lossy compression such as Vorbis or MP3 lose data by stripping the stream of frequencies mostly inaudible by humans (some humans can hear them, most don't), Vorbis has a better algorithm and strips less frequencies from the stream, while MP3 has fixed set of frequencies (IIRC) that it strips (this all depends on the bit rate, though), so while Vorbis files have already been stripped, they may still include some frequencies recognized by MP3... Problem is that by transcoding from a lossy to a lossy format, more data is lost in the process and depending on the bit rate settings you may end up with file sounding something similar to what you get when you try to over-clean or de-noise a recording from an Vinyl disc (kind of a metallic tone). So for instance if you transcode from .oga/.ogg Vorbis at 192 kbps to MP3 at the same or similar bit rate (192 or 160), you may not notice much loss in quality, but if you transcode from Vorbis 128kbps to MP3 96kbps, you will notice much more loss than from integer .wav to MP3 96kbps, and it also depends quite a lot on the listener's ears.