convert,rip and clearty

[ClownR]

hey. I have recently listened to mp4a audio which has an excellent sound quality. I have mp3 songs that I would like to convert it to mp4a if is possible. Second, I have audio cds of albums, that I want to directly rip to mp4a. Lastly, what is mp4a? what type of audio is it and what quality, I tried google it wasnt much of a help.

Thanks :)

[anti]

Besweet (http://dspguru.doom9.net/) will convert mp3 to "mp4" with the BSN plugin (http://besweet.notrace.dk/plug-ins.htm). Apple's iTunes (http://www.apple.com/itunes/) and Nero Digital (http://ww2.nero.com/nerodigital/enu/index.html) will also convert mp3 to your desired mp4 container. The simplest way to rip your audio collection to AAC would most likely be iTunes (http://www.apple.com/itunes/).

However please note that transcoding mp3 songs into Mp4a would not increase song quality. If anything you would lose quality. Mp3 is mpeg-1 layer 3, which would happen to be a lossy audio compression. Since you no longer have the original audio data to work with, the new codec you want to re-encode it with will have have to basically pick up the pieces and re compress an already compressed audio stream. A good analogy would be converting a highly compressed JPEG (http://www.jpeg.org/jpeg/index.html) into a loosely compressed PCD (http://www.kodak.com). You would not increase the quality of the file since its already highly compressed and most likely lose it instead, since .pcd uses a different method of compression.

Mp4a sounds like, if you're referring to the extension, an extension that Apple iTunes audio files use, however if you're referring to the codec, I'm pretty sure it's AAC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Coding) or it might possibly be ALAC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALAC). MP4 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP4) is only a container.

At proper settings and comparable bit rates AAC should outperform mp3. It was designed to be its successor.