Code-Name: Iceman coversion?

[WildmanCAL]

I absolutely love the soundtrack to Code-Name: Iceman and listen to it often.  Thank you, Tom, for posting it up on this site.

What I wonder is if it will ever see the light-of-day as MP3 files as I want to listen to it on my iPhone and can't because the files are in OGG Vorbis.  What are the chances it could happen and is there anything I can do to help facilitate it?

Thanks.

[MusicallyInspired]

OGGs are better. But it's easy enough to make MP3s. All you have to do is decode the OGGs back to WAV files and encode the WAVs as MP3s. The LameDropXPD program should do this with one drag & drop motion automatically.

[endre1952]

Yes, you can. But if you convert an OGG to MP3, it sort of results in loss of generation, since you have used lossy compression on the recording twice rather than once.

[MusicallyInspired]

Of course. But if you're going to listen to it on an iPhone you shouldn't expect optimal quality anyway.

[jharris01]

What I wonder is if it will ever see the light-of-day as MP3 files as I want to listen to it on my iPhone and can't because the files are in OGG Vorbis.  What are the chances it could happen and is there anything I can do to help facilitate it?

You can do it yourself. Just google up a search like "ogg to mp3" and you will find plenty of utilities that will do what you want.

[Marten]

I would recommend Audacity for re-encoding.  http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
(If you are on a Mac, hit the 'download' tab and there are Mac versions for it too!  I'm guessing you're not on Linux, using your iPhone...  )

Tom encodes his oggs with a pretty high quality, so the degradation you get for re-encoding into mp3 should be minimal as long as you also use a high quality on the mp3 encoding.

As for whether Ogg is better than mp3... I'm not going to debate that but I'll point out that Betamax was believed to be better, and it didn't become the defacto format.  Many compression formats came out to compete with Phil Katz' ZIP compression, many superior (ARJ's spanning abilities were much better), but ZIP still became the standard.  Sometimes... what matters most is not whether something is better, but whether it is the most widely adopted.

[WildmanCAL]

OGGs are better. But it's easy enough to make MP3s. All you have to do is decode the OGGs back to WAV files and encode the WAVs as MP3s. The LameDropXPD program should do this with one drag & drop motion automatically.

I didn't post to bring up a debate about the quality of OGG vs. MP3.  I was hoping Tom could convert his original WAV files to MP3 and post them so I could avoid the loss of quality, however small it is.  I've already converted them from OGG to WAV to MP3 so I thank you all for your opinions/suggestions.

[MusicallyInspired]

Some time ago Tom used to make MP3s when the digital audio download areas of this website were in its infancy, but then he made a public stance to support OGG for his entire website as opposed to MP3. Since then everything's been in OGG. I'd like to see some FLACs myself.

[endre1952]

I meant to post a request for FLACs. Of course, I do have the option to record some of the midi files on one of my modules, and encode those in FLAC format.