Darcy, you are mistaken. You cannot edit an mp3 in native mode as it is an encoded format. It may look to you as if you are directly editing the mp3 when you open it, but any audio editor must of course convert the file to an audio waveform before it can be edited (whether WAV, AIFF, or a native internal format). I suppose you could edit the raw mp3 data, but that would be quite useless -- it's just bits and bytes, not audio.
You are correct that every stage of conversion to and from mp3 (or any lossy format) can potentially degrade quality compared to the original; the degree of degradation will depend on the amount of compression. This will be equally true in QuickTime Player as any other editor. Lee Actor (former digital signal processing expert in another life) Composer-in-Residence and Assistant Conductor, Palo Alto Philharmonic Assistant Conductor, Nova Vista Symphony http://www.leeactor.com > > On 13 Feb 2009, at 4:02 PM, Aaron Sherber wrote: > > > Hmm. I was unaware that there were mainstream apps that could edit > > MP3s natively. > > There certainly are. You can open an MP3 in QuickTime Player and edit > it directly there without converting to some other format. And Fission > (the app I use to split long single audio files recorded at my gigs > into individual tracks and normalize them) also works on whatever > audio format you begin with, without converting anything. > > > I assumed that the process was like working with JPGs -- if you have > > a JPG as a source, you open it and save it as a TIF or something > > else non-lossy so it won't get any worse while you work on it. If > > you edit the JPG and save back as a JPG, it gets worse each time, > > because you're re-applying the lossy compression to something that > > was lossy to begin with. Am I incorrect? > > You are right that that up-sampling *shouldn't* introduce any new > artifacts. But if you take an MP3, up-sample it and save as WAV, and > then (without editing anything) down-sample it and save it as an MP3, > the resultant MP3 will sound worse than the original MP3. > > I don't use Audacity so I'm not familiar with what goes on under the > hood. But if Audacity works in its own native format, that strikes me > as even more of a reason not to save the file out as a WAV file before > editing, since (if I understand the situation correctly) any work you > do in Audacity will always be done in its own native format. > > Cheers, > > - Darcy > ----- > djar...@earthlink.net > Brooklyn, NY > _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
