There are a lot of different programs that can make MP3 for you. The first thing however is a good recording. A good recording begins with the keyboard output.
If it sounds great from the onboard speakers, it might not sound so great through the computer because of filtering.
So first check your recording.
Recording it directly in the computer is possible, but you need a good soundcard. Laptops are not very good recorders if you use the onboard soundcard.
The analogue sound is digitalized by the soundcard and the quality of the AD-converter is very important.
If you record it on a MiniDisc the quality is already reduced because of ATRAC audio-compression. You cannot hear this, but if you play it and record it with the computer, and later on transform that recording into MP3 (MPEG soundcompression), there is a degradation of the sound because of cascading soundcompressions. It is not always audible but on some voices you might notice the degradation.
After recording, the last step is turning the pcm (.WAV or other lineair digital audioform like SD2 or AIFF) into MPEG.
MPEG at the highest bitrate (384 kbps) is the best quality, but you can go down with the bitrate to 128 kbps, without too much loss in quality.
Only if you use MP3Pro you can go lower than that, without losing too much.
There are different MPEG3 codecs. The official MP3 is Fraunhofer, but LAME is very popular as well. You can download several codecs from the internet.
There are other compression methods, like OGG. The files are little bigger than MP3, but the quality is very good.
Check these links:
http://mp3.about.com/od/convertaudiofiles/ http://www.audio-converter.com/ http://www.tucows.com/audiocon95_default.html ------------------
drdalet [This message has been edited by drdalet (edited 10-21-2004).]
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