Mp3 faq - convert MP3 to WAV for editing

If I convert MP3 to WAV for editing, won't I lose quality when I encode to MP3 again?

Yes, there is some additional loss of quality when you re-encode to MP3... so you should certainly try to avoid doing this sort of thing repeatedly. But if you re-encode at a reasonable bitrate (160 kbps or higher) with a decent encoder, then the loss of quality should not be very noticeable. And you really don't have much choice, unless the editing you want to do is fairly basic - performing complex audio edits on an MP3 file without decoding end re-encoding the data is pretty much impossible, due to the complex nature of the frame-based perceptual encoding used.

A fairly close analogy would be to JPEG and BMP on the graphics front. Like MP3, JPEG is a perceptual encoding scheme, whereas BMP is the direct, uncompressed way of storing the colour and intensity data, very much similar to the way WAV files store uncompressed PCM data (normally - admittedly the situation is somewhat complicated by the fact that there *are* sub specifications under which both WAV and BMP files can actually contain compressed data). Essentially whenever you do substantial editing on a JPG file in a graphics editor, the picture is being decoded to uncompressed bitmap data, similar to that used in an uncompressed BMP file, for editing, and then the JPEG compression has to be redone if you save the results as a JPG file. Hence if you want to do a lot of editing to a graphic, keep it as a BMP file until you've completed all your editing, then save the *final* result as a JPG, and similarly if you want to do a lot of editing to an audio file, keep it as a WAV fi
le until you've completed all your editing, then save the *final* result as MP3.

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