The desktop beyond F10

[Gian Paolo Mureddu]

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.