[kupietz]

Originally Posted by bob francais

I am a little slow to understand how mp3 looses quality .I am not talking about thetrading pool, just in general. I have downloaded alot of music from different places in mp3 format and have them on a harddrive, If I copy them to a cd in the same mp3 format do I loose quality everytime or do I only loose quality if I convert them to another format? Can someone please explain? thank you.

Basically, to save filesize, MP3 encoding discards audio every time you convert something INTO mp3 from another format. So copying mp3 files from one place to another won't degrade quality any further, or converting them into a lossless format (WAV, AIFF, FLAC, SHN, etc.) won't either. But, as Lynne points out, copying them into a lossless format and then BACK into mp3 will degrade quality further. Converting them into a different lossy format (AAC) also will.