Several thousand 320kbps mp3s of studio and live high fidelity recordings of concerts will be landing on my computer soon. (not pirated, I promise you!)
I'm happy to have and use them for personal use (not for streaming per se, but at some point, I would probably want a way to set up a streaming solution for personal use). Right now I primarily plan to use them for casual listening on tablets on from a Windows PC.
My 50 year old non-musician ears can live with some artefacts. As of a year ago I've been ripping my CDs into opus vbr -- you can't beat its file size and sound quality. Frankly, 320Kbps are unwieldy for personal listening because they take up a lot of space.
I would probably need to keep one version for my archive format. Here are my choices:
- save the mp3 320 as my archive format and transcode to opus
- save the mp3 320 as my archive format and transcode to a lower bit rate of mp3
- convert the mp3 320 to flac (for my archive format) and then downcovert to opus
MY QUESTIONS:
- would there be any reason to think that transcoding from a high quality mp3 to opus would have significantly more artefacts than transcoding to a lower quality version of the same lossy mp3 codec?
- Would there be any value in inserting the intermediary step of saving those 320kpbs mp3s to a lossless format like flac before using another lossy codec to downconvert?
Up until now I have been using dbpoweramp to do my ripping and conversions. (opus 1.1.1, LAME, 3.99.5). I am using only players which can read opus files.
Thanks.