Burkels, I thought I was a lonely voice there, regarding this MP3 to WAV lark, till you spoke up. I suppose I started this by asking for higher quality MP3s of Gary's great voice.

From how I read it, Terry and Gary seemed to be implying that they were converting the MP3s back to their 'original' WAV state.

This was why I especially said "I didn't think you could 'reverse-engineer' MP3s back to their former glory" and later on, "MP3 is lossy compression... how have you regained what has been lost forever?" and mentioning sorcery

The only compressed audio files which can be 'unzipped' to their original former WAV state are ones produced with the lossless codecs... hence my mention of FLAC and Monkey's Audio.

I took some time finding a codec that wouldn't produce flanging or other artifacts in the 128kbps MP3s on my site.

I purposely wanted to keep file sizes small enough for internet distribution... but, they had to have sound good.

Scott Yee has one of my recordings in FLAC format... 'If'. Once he listens to it... then compares it to my 128kbps MP3 file of the same song... I think he'll be impressed by how much of the original sound was retained during conversion to MP3 using this older Fraunhofer codec.
http://www.ping.be/satcp/eac13.htm

If I was using bundled codecs in programs such as Nero... Total Recorder... Musicmatch etc... I'd definitely have to go 192kbps or above to get the same kind of quality.

Gary, there would be a marked difference in quality between your 64kbps 22kHz MP3s and at least 128kbps 44kHz encoded MP3s (depending on the quality of the original WAV master of course)... I'd still love to hear em if you get a chance!

MP3-wise, it's the jump from 192kbps to 256kbps and beyond when most people start finding it harder to discern any improvement in quality.

All the best,
Rich

[This message has been edited by RichUK (edited 03-05-2004).]