Mastering mp3's... is it possible?

[SkipB]

I know there is a lot of contraversy over this subject, and by all rights the statements made to the negative side of it are valid ones for sure. But lets say someone sends an mp3 at a higher quality say.. 320kb or higher. Ok instead of decoding this to .wav, lets just bring it into a good quality mp3 player,play it back, and record it to Wavelab at a rate of 44.1 32bit. My question is,would this be ok? I know it would be a lot of trouble to re-record a song from mp3, but I have been doing it on occasion with some fairly good results. I use a Lynx AES-16SRC and the built in software mixer helps to accomplish this with ease. Anyway I would like to hear from others that may be doing this. Whether negative, or positive I would like to know. Regards

[HarBal]

Hi SkipB,

Re-eq'ing mp3s is fine but if you have access to an uncompressed source of the same material you should always use that, the reason being that mp3 is a lossy format so some material you would normally hear after eq'ing may not be there anymore because the perceptual encoder deemed it in-audible.

On how to go about it, why can't you just open the mp3 in wavlab and the save it to pcm wav format. This is far better than "recording" it, unless the mp3 decoder is crap. It's my understanding of mp3 that decoding is the easy part and the part that differs considerably between one mp3 codec and another is the quality of the encoding process.

Regards,


Paavo.

PS - I've managed to construct some useful filter for har-bal users from decoded mp3 they've sent me and they sounded ok to both myself and those who sent them, so re-processing mp3 seems fine to me (if you have no other choice). Certainly better than listening to the sound without re-processing.