Is converting from MP3 to FLAC worth it?

[Topher925]

So I got a new mp3 player that supports FLAC but all my music is in mp3 form. Is it worth converting from mp3 to FLAC since the audio files have already taken losses when they were converted to mp3? Is there anyway at all to recover compressed mp3 files back to WAV or FLAC quality?

 

[waht]

Not really. Quality is lost with mp3, and it's irrecoverable. It's much better to convert a CD quality sound to FLAC.

 

[Topher925]

Thats unfortunate. Looks like I'll have to break out the CDs.

 

[bp_psy]

Thats unfortunate. Looks like I'll have to break out the CDs.

If you only listen to them on headphones and they have a decent bit-rate you can just continue using your mp3's.

 

[Topher925]

Yeah but the player supports what ever bit-rate I want and I've got excellent headphones. I tried comparing a song in mp3 and wav format and definitely heard a difference.

 

[Topher925]

I tried converting an mp3 file to a FLAC file and did a comparison and there is really no difference in sound quality. But when I convert from WAV to FLAC, the sound is A-mazing. To bad 99% of my music is in mp3 form.

 

[Sporkman]

I scanned all my CDs into FLAC, and I serve them up via http://www.subsonic.org/pages/index.jsp" .

 

[Mech_Engineer]

I tried converting an mp3 file to a FLAC file and did a comparison and there is really no difference in sound quality. But when I convert from WAV to FLAC, the sound is A-mazing. To bad 99% of my music is in mp3 form.

MP3 is a lossy compresison algorithm. Once you have created an MP3 the losses have already taken place (on the MP3 side) and you can't "upconvert" back to the original sound quality.

It's like resizing a 3000*2000 pixel (6 megapixel) image file to 1000*666 pixels (0.6 megapixel). Once you've lost the data, there is no way to "convert" the 0.6 megapixel image back to a 6 megapixel image. However you can take the original 6 megapixel file and resize it to any resolution you like.