Re-encoding MP3s in a sane fashion?

[paulehoffman]

Greetings again. I have a stack of CDs of live music performances burned by someone who started with MP3s. I want to convert them back to MP3 for playing on a player that does not handle WAV or SHN or FLAC. I know that there will be artifacts in doing so, and thus my question.

Are there known-good LAME settings for this that do a "fair amount" of space reduction? I'd be happy with a 50% or greater space reduction if I could not hear it. If not, what is the correct way to tell LAME "do the minimum conversion even if that means you are essentially creating uncompressed files in order to reduce artifacts"?

[sneaker_ger]

--preset insane

[LoRd_MuldeR]

Are there known-good LAME settings for this that do a "fair amount" of space reduction? I'd be happy with a 50% or greater space reduction if I could not hear it.

Even MP3 encoded with CBR mode at the maximum bitrate of 320 kbit/s (which is the maximum quality you can get out of MP3) will be less than 50% in size, compared to the umcompressed PCM.

So in your case "lame.exe --cbr -b 320 -h" should do the job.

With these settings the files will be even smaller than your 50% requirement and you certainly won't be able to hear the loss. And if you really do hear it, then MP3 simply cannot satisfy your ears ;)

(BTW: It should be clear that if your CD's were created from MP3's, there already was some loss. So the re-encoded files cannot be better than the quality on your CD!)

[AMED]

I would use --preset extreme aka -V 0

http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=LAME

[sara.furry]

That wiki link is quite helpful ... thanks for sharing.