Anyone Know of an Mp3 Converter?

[locustfurnace]

Originally posted by myfriendwilly7@Mar 25 2004, 03:02 AM
And there is no such thing as lossless encoding.

?
Yes there is. There is even JPEG lossless formats now.

Monkey's Audio Lossless
Monkey’s Audio is a fast and easy way to compress digital music. Unlike traditional methods such as mp3, ogg, or lqt that permanently discard quality to save space, Monkey’s Audio only makes perfect, bit-for-bit copies of your music. That means it always sounds perfect – exactly the same as the original. Even though the sound is perfect, it still saves a lot of space. (think of it as a beefed-up Winzip™ for your music)
FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec
Grossly oversimplified, FLAC is similar to MP3, but lossless, meaning that audio is compressed in FLAC without any loss in quality. This is similar to how Zip works, except with FLAC you will get much better compression because it is designed specifically for audio, and you can play back compressed FLAC files in your favorite player (or your car or home stereo, see links to the right for supported devices) just like you would an MP3 file.
Windows Media Audio 9 Lossless
WMA 9 Lossless is a great new codec to use for archiving CD collections. Audiophiles can copy their CDs into this lossless format for efficient storage. This content can then be transferred to Windows Media Audio 9 based CDs for playback.
Shorten
fast waveform coder suitable for a speech and music signals in a wide variety of file formats. The degree of compression is adjustable from lossless to three bits a sample. 16bit 16kHz speech generally attains 50% lossless compression and 16:3 compression of CDROM quality speech is obtainable with only minor audiable degredation.
OptimFROG
OptimFROG is a lossless audio compression program. Its main goal is to reduce at maximum the size of audio files, while premitting bit identical restoration for all input. It is similar with the ZIP compression, but it is highly specialized to compress audio data.
WavPack
WavPack allows you to losslessly compress (and restore) both 16 and 24-bit audio files in the .WAV format. Unlike "lossy" compression schemes (like MP3) that discard information, WavPack converts the audio data into a more compact form so that the restored files are digitally identical to the original source. It's somewhat like the file compression portion of WinZIP except that it's optimized for audio data. Like other lossless compression schemes the data reduction varies with the source, but it is generally between 25% and 50% for typical popular music and somewhat better than that for classical music and other sources with greater dynamic range.[*]La
is a lossless audio compressor[*]Lossless Audio Compression with LTAC
LTAC (Lossless Transform Audio Compression) allows for lossless audio compression of PCM coded audio signals (16 bit), i.e. decoding results bit for bit in the original bit stream of the PCM coded signal. In contrast to LTAC there exist a lot of lossy coding algorithms like MPEG, ATRAC and AC-3, which yield higher compression ratios but in any case lead to coding distortions - nothing for HiFi purists and professionals.


Lossless Image compression
[*].div
is a new and efficient, loss less Image compression algorithm that is able to provide better compression than the currently available loss less image compression formats in the market. The compression algorithm provides us with data in such a way that the image becomes virtually interlaced.[*]JPEG-LS
JPEG-LS is the new lossless/near-lossless compression standard for continuous-tone images, ISO-14495-1/ITU-T.87. The standard is based on the LOCO-I algorithm (LOw COmplexity LOssless COmpression for Images) developed at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories.[*]RICAZip
RICAZip is a family of software products for lossless image compression[*]Portable Network Graphics
A Turbo-Studly Image Format with Lossless Compression

Other compression, mostly used to compress non-audio data[*]LZO and the LZO
LZO is a portable lossless data compression library written in ANSI C. [*]zlib
zlib is designed to be a free, general-purpose, legally unencumbered -- that is, not covered by any patents -- lossless data-compression library for use on virtually any computer hardware and operating system[*]NRV generic data compression library (megs)
oberhumer.com has designed and implemented the on-board lossless data compression module of the NASA Mars Exploration Rovers, better known under the names Spirit and Opportunity. [*]UCL (megs)
is a portable lossless data compression library written in ANSI C.[*]GRZip
is a high-performance file compressor based on Burrows-Wheeler Transform and Advanced Weighted Frequency Counting. It uses The Block-Sorting Lossless Data Compression Algorithm, which has received considerable attention over recent years for both its simplicity and effectiveness.

If interested, one can read about lossless compression here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossless_compression

Originally posted by myfriendwilly7@Mar 25 2004, 03:02 AM
And there is no such thing as lossless encoding.

Really?

Encoding to Wave and FLAC is Lossless. As is encoding to Shorten, Lossless Audio, TA, Optim Frog, Monkeys Audio etc.

Damn - beaten to it!

Lets not be picky. I believe I said "except for winzip style compression." Monkeys Audio simply gets rid of redundant data, like winzip. Wav is bit-for-bit what comes off a CD (if you go with a 44KHz 16 bit wave). That is a big difference from encoding to mp3, wma, ogg, or any of the other large-scale compression encoders out there. And that is what i meant. And if there is anything out there that claims to be lossless and the compression ratio is greater than MAYBE 5% (making the new file 95% the original wave size), it is lying.

"The Big Willy"

[locustfurnace]

wav is just a container format for many types of other formats, such as uncompressed 'PCM,' (Pulse Code Modulation), you can have a mp3 encoded song stuffed into a wav file. you can also have an ADPCM, 'Adaptive Differential Pulse Code Modulation' in a wav format container. When you rip a cd on a Apple or SGI, its not a wav format, its an .aiff/.aif.

PCM is the native format used by WAV and AIFF files for representing sound.

I spoke in generalities. In all my posts, when I have said a wav file, I meant a PCM-format wav file, of CD quality. Since I was discussing mp3s and songs and stuff like that, I didnt think to specify it as such. My apologies for any confusion that may have caused, with apple users or anyone else. I have windows, and I use wave files for pretty much only songs from CDs, and made the writer's mistake of assuming the reader will read it the way I would.

"The Big Willy"

ok guys, CDBurnerXP Pro its free, great and does everything MMJ prob will not let me post this. The new MMJ is crap. Why should I pay more to upgrade just to get super taging. This is BS.

[locustfurnace]

Who said anything about paying to upgrade? This discussion is about mp3 conversion, not focusing on MMJB, if your not happy with MMJB, then you should email the developers. Or find something else. Look around in the forum to find freeware ID3v1/IDv2 tagging apps. You should not have to pay for a tagger, thats rather pointless. Better yet, I will drop the link to a previous posting with freeware tagging utilities.
http://www.oldversion.com/talk/index.php?a...&st=0#entry7065

if a program is still needed, hit downloads.com and pick up *power mp3 converter*

converts ogg wma mp3... does the job for me and its free.....

Dan.....

This is MY understanding of the way that things work....

WiMP9 can indeed be used to compress files, however is is a LOSSLESS encoder --- that is, it squeezes out the silence in music tracks without losing any audio data, therefore it will enable one to then encode the "squeezed" file into the LOSSY MP3 format without incurring an unacceptable audio penalty.

That said...the best solution that I have found for MP3 encoding is to use Exact Audio Copy (EAC), which is free for the download and registration consists of sending the author a postcard with stamp (not postage meter imprint) <speaking of which...I STILL need to do so> along with the aforementioned LAME encoder. MaximumPC has an EXCELLENT article on how to install and configure the programs....I have used this setup with a variable 192Kbps bitrate and have seen it encode as high as 360Kbps and as low as 92Kbps, depending upon the musical complexity of any given passage with a track.

I hope that this helps you in your quest.

BTW....EAC is also "backwards compatible"; ie: it will take and MP3 files and DEcompress them into regular audio format for burning so that one could play a burned audio CD in a car player....WORKS WELL in this mode too!

Steve[color=blue]
rhondohslade@yahoo.com[color=red]