Exile In Paradise wrote: > Do you happen to know of any good MP3 to Ogg recoders? There are some out there, but beware that these programs incur the same risk as MP3 players because patents cover ideas, not expressions of ideas. This means the MP3 patents cover the MP3->Ogg Vorbis transcoders just as they cover other MP3 decoders. > I have heard that recoding can drop/mess with the quality, and I have > some MP3s that I ripped from my CDs at 320kbps, and I can really tell a > difference if they get dropped to 128Kbps (thanks Window Media > Mangler... grrr!) Yes, transcoding is virtually guaranteed to hurt quality when you're dealing with lossy encoding schemes (such as MP3 and Ogg Vorbis). Of course, lossless transcoding only risks the metadata. But you risk losing/transforming metadata with each format shift anyhow. > Any pointers on moving an existing collection out of MP3 format that > doesn't really mess with the quality would be welcome. What you're looking for doesn't exist and won't exist because of the nature of the ways in which lossy encoders work. What you could do is re-rip and re-encode in a lossless format like FLAC. FLAC is both Free Software and lossless (hence the name (F)ree (L)ossless (A)udio (C)odec). http://flac.sourceforge.net/ has more information. The tradeoff you're making is size--FLAC files are bound to be larger than the lossy-compressed versions of the same audio. I've seen FreshRPMs.net carry FLAC programs for many GNU/Linux distributions. http://yarrow.freshrpms.net/rpm.html?id=65 has RPMs for Fedora Core 1 GNU/Linux (including an XMMS plugin to play FLACs directly). >From a lossless encoding scheme you can go to any lossless scheme you wish and never have to re-rip again (so long as you're satisfied with the rip you encoded losslessly). By sticking with a Free Software encoding scheme, you have software you can port to whatever OS you want and you'll never have to fear making your collection obsolete because your new software won't read your old files.
