MP3 to OGG conversion--plausible/any advantages?

So I got a spiffy new MP3 player (Creative Zen), and am finally going to cut my teeth with alternate formats (the MP3s are staring to sound like crap and I'm not sure if it's the speakers or the files themselves). Most of my original CDs are halfway across the country, and a couple I no longer have at all. I do however have most of the discs ripped to one or another of my hard drives in MP3 format.

My question is, would converting the MP3s to Ogg be possible (if it is, would there be any appreciable improvement in sound), or would I need to hunt down all my discs and re-rip them?

I don't know if it is possible, but I don't see much point to it. Unless the conversion can magically return the lost bits from when it was converted to .mp3.

Yes, hunt down your discs and re-rip if you want better sound. Re-compressing into ogg will yield no audio benefits. It's analogous to de-artififacting a jpeg. It can't practically be done back 100%.

Going from one lossy format like mp3 to ogg you will lose quality. Your ears may not tell the difference, but the quality loss is there.

Like the poster above me stated, just re-rip your disc if you really want ogg format.

Here is a good site to read about various formats etc. http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php

If it were me and I had to pick between that two, mp3 or ogg, I would stay with mp3 using lame, it has come a long way.

Depending on where you use your player, MP3 at 192Kbps to 224Kbps will be about the highest quality you need. Background noise and cheap headphones will prevent anything much higher from actually sounding better, it will just take more space. If you really want good quality sound for listening to in a quiet environment with good quality speakers, then jack up the MP3 bitrate to 320Kbps. Or, if Rockbox will run on your player, you could use a lossless format, such as FLAC.

Aha, reripping it is then. Bit of a pain in the tail, but oh well...it'll give me another chance to go through my CD collection. Anyone know of good (preferably freeware) ripping apps that will handle .ogg?

EAC works with various formats, although I've never used it to do ogg, I'm not sure if it has the required files needed to encode to ogg.

Here is another site that has some useful info, linked to a page for ogg for you. Rarewares.

And yes re-ripping suxs, had to do it myself, some of my mp3's got corrupted, but thats part of it I guess.

Winamp will. It's not open-source free, but it'll rip for you.

this is going a little off topic, but remember that sound quality is very dependent on your hardware (sound card/mp3 player) and speakers/headphones, not just the format/kbps. If you're using some cheap $20 headphones, or one of the way-overpriced popular bose headphones (no offense if anyone is using these), your sound will be crap and you won't notice the difference between 128 and 320 kbps. Go for Audio-Technica or Grado headphones.

Ogg > Mp3, as it was already said. Flac > all of those but it takes up insane space (1000-1500 kbps) so probably not ideal for a portable player. But on my PC I have a pretty good amount of music in .flac and I notice a big increase in quality over 320 kbps mp3's. Tweaking equalizer settings also makes a very big improvement in sound on a PC.

don'tknow said:

this is going a little off topic, but remember that sound quality is very dependent on your hardware (sound card/mp3 player) and speakers/headphones, not just the format/kbps. If you're using some cheap $20 headphones, or one of the way-overpriced popular bose headphones (no offense if anyone is using these), your sound will be crap and you won't notice the difference between 128 and 320 kbps. Go for Audio-Technica or Grado headphones.

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Also depends on the environment you're listening in (car with road noises, waiting room with people talking and little kids that won't shut up, home living room with no extraneous noise, etc.)

don'tknow said:

Ogg > Mp3, as it was already said. Flac > all of those but it takes up insane space (1000-1500 kbps)

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Lossless audio compression is, by nature, VBR, and can differ greatly between different tracks. Some music can be compressed to 600 Kbps ABR, while some never dips below 1200 Kbps ABR. I have a CD of Vivaldi violin concertos in FLAC, and they're all ~700 Kbps, while nearly all of my Sonata Arctica tracks are >1000 Kbps. Infected Mushroom tracks are mostly ~900 Kbps.

Rerip your library to flac, that way you can just convert the lossless files to whatever lossy file type you like. If you rip to ogg, then later want something else, you will have to rerip again.

The only benefit you stand to get by re encoding your MP3's to ogg's, is a marginal reduction in file size. This also depends on the quality settings you set.

if it's too much hassle to find your cd's and rip them again, then you should just stay with the mp3's because as those guys before me said, it wouldn't do any good