RealAudio Mystery

[ZonePage]

There are some voice-only files that were encoded in RealAudio several years ago at 16K/16K. After I downloaded them from the web site, I converted them to 64K MP3 to listen to them on my MP3 player. The quality of the original RA files is surprisingly good. The conversion to MP3 is good. In fact, I am shocked at how good they are.

I now have the original WAV files from which the RA files were produced. When I convert them from WAV to MP3, they don't sound as good as the RA files on the web site, even though the sampling rate (and file size) is four times higher. Is it possible that there is a commercial version of the RealAudio converter that makes better files than the codecs that are available for free? I cannot figure out how those 16K files were make so well.

This whole situation is a real mystery to me. I need to convert many files, but the resulting quality now is not very good. There must be a secret out there!

If you are interested, one of the 16K/16K files is here (http://gatewaypeople.com/store/samples/sermons/2001/3-31-2001.ram).

[Sirber]

RealAudio is very loosy. Reconverting it will only bring lower Q at higher bitrate.

[eidenk]

The quality of the original RA files is surprisingly good. The conversion to MP3 is good. In fact, I am shocked at how good they are.

Me too I came across such files albeit they were music at 48k if I remember correctly. They were encoded around 1997/1998 and it has been a real pain to manage to playback them in the first place. Real Player 10 complained it hadn't the proper codecs installed and subsequently refused to download them from Real Networks for some reason. I finally managed to find a Real Player 3 and 4 for download on Real Networks. Then I got myself amazed by the quality especially considering the date of the files.

How did you convert to mp3 ? I had to record the soundcard output from Real Player 4.