When conveting music from 1 format to another, will the quality drop?

Question

Original track ripped from CD to 128bit WMA. Thereafter, convert from 128bit WMA format to 320bit WMA Pro, will quality improve?

Answer 1

Hi kel. The quality should'nt drop as long as your suporting software is up to scratch but most about at the mo should be fine. However the quality won't improve even thou u r transfering your media to a higher quality format as it will only ever be as good as the origional data. hope this is a help.

Answer 2

Generally speaking there will be a change in the data, but not a noticable loss. Different formats use different encoding techniques to achieve data compression. They all have good and bad points but they kindof equal out.

As for enocding at a higher bitrate, you cannot improve the sound quality of an already compressed format by recompressing it into another file. This is because you cannot recover data that you've already lost. You're just making the filesize bigger, and also probably introducing more noise because the dynamic range is wider but wasn't taken advantage of by encoding at the higher bitrate in the first place.
But if you have the original cd or wav file and encoded it at 320Kbits, you would notice it is better sounding then the 128Kbits version.

Answer 3

mild compressed quality, thats all... and no, it wont sound anybetter.. just take more space