If you have a high-quality audio file that you want to convert to a higher bitrate for better quality, there are several ways to do this. You can use an audio converter, such as Audacity, to change the bitrate of the audio file. You can also use software that automatically adjusts the bitrate of an audio file based on its quality. ..
Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites.
The Question
SuperUser reader Cipricus poses the question:
This is an important consideration; there’s no point in expanding the size of your files by X% if there isn’t an increase in audio quality.
Would this result in higher audio quality or just in a bigger file?
The Answer
SuperUser contributor Linac offers a practical answer to his question. Despite what popular opinion would have us believe, there are practical reasons for upgrading the bitrate during conversion:
Have something to add to the explanation? Sound off in the the comments. Want to read more answers from other tech-savvy Stack Exchange users? Check out the full discussion thread here.
If you have a file with 95kbps in a highly efficient format, to retain the same quality, a relatively inefficient format as mp3 needs a higher bitrate.
Of course you will never get anything back that was lost in the first place. On the contrary, encoding as mp3 will reduce the quality further. Every lossy format uses other means to reduce the amount of data that is stored, by (simplified) throwing away “unneeded” parts of the data. Round trip through a bunch of different formats and there won’t be much left …
So if you want to stay as close a possible to the quality your file has now, you should chose a higher bitrate. 320kbps are probably wasted space, but for mp3 something in the order between 128 and 192 is needed to maintain – or at least come close to – the quality of a more efficient 95kbps file.
