Compressing compressed music files with a lossless buffer?

Shakedown

Active Member
The golden rule is to never compress an already compressed audio file.

However what if you convert a compressed file to a lossless format first?

AAC < AIFF < MP3 (random scenario)

Just out of curiosity, would that negate the terrible effects of converting a lossy to another lossy?
 
Last edited:
No.

Once the data is gone...it's gone. Going back to WAV or AIFF still creates a file that has all that stuff missing.

Compressing that WAV to another lossy format is a lossy transcode.
 
Transcoding from one compressed format to another always uses decompression to PCM as an intermediate stage. I don't know him there are any transcoding functions that operate in the compressed data domain.

If your source is lossy compression, the PCM will be lossy. Therefore the transcoded output will be lossy to start with.

If you use a different lossy compressor to recompress, you'll get further losses.
 
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