On 13 Feb 2009, at 4:02 PM, Aaron Sherber wrote:
Hmm. I was unaware that there were mainstream apps that could edit MP3s natively.
There certainly are. You can open an MP3 in QuickTime Player and edit it directly there without converting to some other format. And Fission (the app I use to split long single audio files recorded at my gigs into individual tracks and normalize them) also works on whatever audio format you begin with, without converting anything.
I assumed that the process was like working with JPGs -- if you have a JPG as a source, you open it and save it as a TIF or something else non-lossy so it won't get any worse while you work on it. If you edit the JPG and save back as a JPG, it gets worse each time, because you're re-applying the lossy compression to something that was lossy to begin with. Am I incorrect?
You are right that that up-sampling *shouldn't* introduce any new artifacts. But if you take an MP3, up-sample it and save as WAV, and then (without editing anything) down-sample it and save it as an MP3, the resultant MP3 will sound worse than the original MP3.
I don't use Audacity so I'm not familiar with what goes on under the hood. But if Audacity works in its own native format, that strikes me as even more of a reason not to save the file out as a WAV file before editing, since (if I understand the situation correctly) any work you do in Audacity will always be done in its own native format.
Cheers, - Darcy ----- djar...@earthlink.net Brooklyn, NY _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
