Hi, is it better to burn a cd from a wav. file or from an mp3. file ?
What sounds better ? or does it sound the same ?
The wav. file is a bigger file of course...

What if I convert an mp3 file to wav ? is it better sounding in a car stereo ?

 

No matter which one you burn with mp3 or wav, its going to sound different from a normal CD.
Go with mp3, can burn more songs on a CD.

 

You will not gain any quality by converting the MP3 to WAV, the loss has already occurred. Just go ahead and slap MP3s on a data CD and let the stereo take care of it.

 

whenever I download from soulseek, I always get the 320kb/s bitrate file. Is that the best ?

 

It's pretty high up there. I'm fond of VBR (variable bitrate) audio myself. There's no telling if that 320 is a 'true' 320 or if it's been messed with a few times, but should be the best bet. I usually just see 256 KBit MP3 though.

 

if you want the absolute best quality you have to get it in .flac file. its an exact copy of the original cd, that one would buy at a store. it is lossless.

 

I considered mentioning this as well. The Free Lossless Audio Codec is quite a great compression codec/algorithm, it's WAV quality at about 10 to 20 MB per track, still much less than WAV though about 4x the file size of MP3. My only qualm is that none of the commercial stereo decks support FLAC.

 

man I don't know what kind of super-human hearing you guys have, but I always rip my CD tracks at 192 kbps and it sounds just as good as the original CD in my car. There's too much other noise, road noise etc. to be able to hear any kind sound quality losses over the original CD.

I recently imported some CD tracks for my wife's iPod Nano at 128 kbps (since she only had 8 GB of space) and it sounded just fine to my ears, as well.

 

yeah, the only part that sucks about .flac is trying to play the damn files. haha. its a little pain in teh ***. it would be nice if they had stereos that would play .flac.

 

You have to have a really high end stereo system to be able to barely tell, esp in a car. Some people are really audiophiles though... I can't tell the difference either

 

IMO it's easy to tell the difference with a MP3 encoded at 128kb the highs are the first to go. But if you are used to listening to your music on a crappy audio system to begin with then its probably much harder to tell the difference.

I'm not a complete audiophile but if you start listening to your music on a decent home audio system then you start to pick up differences fairly quickly.

 

I for one had no idea my copy of X & Y sounded like crap until I put it somewhere other than the pc. It really does depend on equiment, I picked up a Kenwood KDC-X991 which brings stuff out.

 

I honestly don't see the issue either only difference i can really tell with original cds vs burnt cds is the volume difference between the two.