[wplug] MP3 or OGG-Vorbis recovery tool?

[Vanco, Don]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Benjamin Slavin [mailto:bslavin_list at wavecrazy.net] 
> Sent: Monday, October 27, 2003 12:03 PM
> To: wplug at wplug.org
> Subject: [wplug] MP3 or OGG-Vorbis recovery tool?
> 
> 
> Good afternoon, folks.
> 
> I have run into a hard-drive failure, which has resulted in 
> the loss of
> a large number of [legal] MP3 and Ogg Vorbis files. 
	Ack!  As my collection has grown to in excess of 50GB I have
nightmares about this.  Bummer....
 
> I do have a number of CDs which I burned from the MP3/Ogg 
> files shortly
> before the failure, and am wondering if there is any way to 
> convert the
> audio on the CDs back to their MP3 or Ogg formats -without- additional
> loss of quality. Would encoding the stream with the exact 
> same settings
> produce the same output (I assume not)?
> 
> Any suggestions, insight, etc. are appreciated. If there are tools for
> this, Linux would be the OS of choice, but I have easy access to OSX,
> WinXP, and *BSD systems.
	To the best of my knowledge there will _always_ be some loss on any
D-to-A (or reverse) format change.  My best results have come from going
from source media  to .wav and then encoding the .wav as required - but
others might have more insight than I can offer.....
	My personal fave is MusicMatch, but there's a lot of stuff out there
to be sure...

	I think the cheapest backup solution for me is going to be a second
hard drive that I only power on once in a while to add data deltas to.....
Incidents like this are the only reason I have not sold all of my CDs and
Vinyl... the eventual need to recover.

Don