[wplug] MP3 or OGG-Vorbis recovery tool?

[Benjamin Slavin]

I certainly understand (rather, assumed) that if I simply use lame (et
al) to encode that there would be quality loss, however my thought was
as follows:

Semi-accurate analogy follows:
1) I create a formatted word processing document
     [original]
     [comparable to the WAV representation]
2) I save it as a plain text document
     [minimal 'readable' form]
     [akin to a WAV with the portions of the waveform missing]
3) then ZIP it
     [compressed minimal form]
     [similar to Ogg or MP3 encoding]
4) UNZIP it
     [document identical to #2]
     [Ogg/MP3 converted to waveform]

Steps 3 and 4 can be performed as many times as one wants.

I understand that one might say "but ZIP is lossless", and I understand
that. However, MP3 and Ogg Vorbis represent waveforms. I'd imagine that
there should be some mathematical way to go from MP3->WAV->MP3 without a
quality loss, but I don't have a firm grasp on how the codecs actually
work internally. I say this only because the quality of the WAV
should(?) be identical to that of the MP3, and I was under the
impression that a CD is just a representation of the waveform, so a CD
burned from MP3s converted to WAV files should have a quality equal to
that of the MP3.

At this point, I've pretty much retired myself to the fact that, at
present, there is no good way to salvage my collection without the
original CDs. If no one can find any sort of flaw in my logic above,
perhaps I have found myself a new summer project.

  --Ben



On Mon, 2003-10-27 at 12:35, Russ Schneider wrote:
> Benjamin Slavin wrote:
> 
> > 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.
> 
> Nope.  Each time you convert audio to MP3 or Ogg, you lose quality. 
> Sort of like when people used to belong to tape trees.   Every 
> generation down the tree had an additional quality loss.
>