Is there a portable app that will convert music formats or change the bit rate?
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BonkEnc Portable will convert some audio formats, or can change bit rate while keeping the same format. It's listed on our Applications page
The developer formerly known as ZGitRDun8705
One thing you have to realize is that changing formats/bitrates will affect the sound greatly. The most common audio formats are very lossy, so to encode from one to the other (mp3 to m4a for example) will greatly reduce sound quality. Lowering audio bitrates will also degrade sound quality, and upping the bitrate of an audio file will not improve sound quality at all as it was already lossy to begin with.
My main point is this: unless it's absolutely necessary, converting formats or changing bitrates should be avoided if you want to preserve sound quality.
Thanks for the help.
i am not a music purist 128 as a bit rate will do for me, but thanks for the advice
Graham Yates
Ideally, convert from a lossless to a lossy format whenever possible.
MediaCoder (free, open-source, portable) and SUPER (free, non-open-source, non-portable) will pretty much do anything (audio/video conversion/modification).
Any good losless format that is common, smaller and good?
FLAC is the most common lossless format, but it's far from small.
aac is also a lossless and small but not opensource.
aac is lossy
sorry i thought it was lossless.
AAC is lossy, and there is an open-source implementation of it.
http://www.audiocoding.com/faac.html
Vintage!
Monkey's Audio can produce smaller files than FLAC, but it's slower (but not slow overall) and is freeware. If lossless files are too big for you, I recommend AAC.
Vintage!
TAK is the strongest reasonably fast lossless codec, but not popular (yet). If you search for a common solution, FLAC is the closest; ALAC, WavPack, Monkey's Audio far behind and the rest almost non-existant.
"Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do." Asimov
Actually Shorten is still widely used also, but it also produces larger files.
FLAC is definitely the standard. I'd stay away from the closed source ones since who knows if they'll disappear tomorrow and having your music held hostage to that would be bad.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Even if they disappear, music can be transcoded to another format, so it's not an issue. And TAK is unlikely to disappear any time soon, it's too good.
"Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do." Asimov
What is the oppinion of OGG Vorbis audio format. I have ripped a cd or two, in Ubuntu to OGG, for use on my laptop.
It's a solid, standardized, open format. You can get good quality at low bitrates. And it doesn't have the same legal issues as MP3 or AAC. But it isn't as widely supported as MP3 hardware-wise. Every software player worth its salt supports it, though.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
And i wonder why wikipedia uses .ogg?
Legal issues.
Vintage!
Audiophiles don't listen to ogg.
I'm not saying anything bad about it, but if you're looking for quality, lossy formats are a no-go, especially with nowadays storage prices. Even portable players prices.
"Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do." Asimov
Yeah. And don't most portable players support AAC nowadays? I know it's uncommon for players to play any lossless formats (support for FLAC is steadily increasing though), but AAC is great for a lossy format.
Vintage!
It's not a problem to find a player that supports lossless audio. In the end you can always buy an apple.
Using lossy music is problematic:
Do you want to keep 2 copies of your music lossy+lossless? If yes, it's a lot of hassle, if not, you need either to copy all your music CDs every few years or stay with having a lossy copy forever. Then you'll never regain lost quality and in case that the format you use becomes obsolete you'll face the decision: recode and loose even more or move to lossless...actually further-loss less.
IMO it's better to just buy a player which supports lossless music.
"Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do." Asimov
In the end you can always buy an apple.
Proper support for ALAC outside of iTunes or an iPod is hard to find. And anyone who knows anything about media players made by big companies wouldn't trust iTunes.
Vintage!
That's why I said "In the end". There's quite a lot of players that support FLAC too.
But even with ALAC it's not so bad. There are free tools that work with it. dbPowerAmp and FFMpeg create them. Practically every software player supports them too, there are also some non-apple hardware ones.
"Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do." Asimov
Most audiophiles will go lossless just because it's lossless. Of course, it is great as it's the best quality and can be converted to any format without further loss. Most normal folks will go with a lossy format so you can get more music onto your things (laptop, mp3 player, etc).
In double-blind, A-B, volume matched testing -- and yes, you need those for it to be a valid test, otherwise it's a biased test and meaningless -- almost no one, including audiophiles, can tell the difference between a lossless audio passage and a lossy one encoded with a good quality encoder at a properly high bitrate.
Personally, I use LAME with -alt-preset extreme which is a VBR ~250kb/s format. The only setting above that in LAME is -alt-preset insane which is CBR 320 and I haven't found anyone that can tell the difference between the two in a proper test.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Bad example. I don't know whether I can tell the difference between mp3 320 and mp3 vbr ~250, but I can easily distinguish the first from the original, granted I use proper (higher mid end+) hardware.
And I really don't have hearing much above average.
You're right, I use lossless because it's lossless, I never tried to find a lossy format that would be indistinguishable from the original and I'm pretty sure that at least it is possible to create one. But I described above while lossless is better. I might not be able to distinguish lossy from the original. After recoding the lossy format to another I might be unable to find the difference between the 2 as well. But I'm pretty sure that after few changes I could feel the difference between the last copy and the original.
Lossless audio preserves quality forever (granted that you use protection software like parchive). Lossy format changes keep degenerating your copy. It's not worth it for me.
"Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do." Asimov
That's the thing that people forget about lossy. If they're going to use it for something else... like say editing it and saving it again. In which case you should absolutely be using lossless. Or, in the case of HD video for most consumers, the losslessest (new word) format you can.
I keep most of my collection as HQ MP3s (LAME alt-preset extreme) since they are indistinguisable from the original source on even good equipment (my Denon amp and my Grado headphones which I love) and I don't intend to do anything else with them. That and I don't have the time or storage space to do both a lossless and a lossy rip of all of it.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Formats change. I expect that I might have to or just find it useful to recode at least once per 10-15 years.
I could save ~100 GB with a lossy format. ~$11 and falling. Not worth it for me.
"Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do." Asimov
You know, you're right. I keep thinking of storage as more limited and costly. I forget that $100 buys a 1TB drive now.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Yeah, technology progress is so fast...I also often find myself overvaluing size, I keep tweaking all my stuff, sometimes to the last 4 KB that I can squeeze and then comes a thought that it's entirely pointless, even GB, even flash is close to nothing.
It's quite common. I had a good laugh when I found that Total Commander 7.5 comes with a note saying that it's much larger then it used to be and it's because the author resigned from upx due to antivirus problems. If you need to run it from a floppy, a compressed version will still be available on the author's forum.
"Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do." Asimov
Hmm... I know I've heard of those. Yeah, I had a single-sided double density for my C64.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!