it's my understanding that converting from mp3>flac>mp3 will result in a final mp3 that is inferior to the original mp3 source. SO, converting an mp3 to flac is doubly bad in that the flac conversion only makes for a bigger, indentical-sounding file that, if subjected to lossy compression (re-compressed to an mp3) will sound worse than the original.
I would say the ooposite though Darrin. At least for my Amadeus Pro software, anything you do other than editing metadata results in a re- encoding to mp3 if you do any editing and then save to the mp3 format.
So unless you are just going to spread the show just as it was recorded -- untracked, no normalization, etc -- you'd be better of editing the master mp3 and then saving as a 16/44 flac. That way, assuming you listen as flac or as flac converted to wav, you'd have only one mp3 encoding -- the original encoding at the time of recording. If you edit and save back to mp3, you'll be stuck with two levels of mp3 encoding, the first during recording and the second following your editing of the master (tracking, normaliztion, etc).
Maybe other software will allow tracking without a re-encoding step, but I doubt it. And I think if you track and normalize, you definitely would be stuck with a second encoding to mp3 if you save back to mp3.
Now if we're expecting people will want to listen in mp3, they will have a second encoding of mp3 if they convert the shared flacs back to mp3. Only way to avoid that is to share direct copies of the master mp3 recording, but people will probably want a tracked show (if not normalized), so they are stuck with 2 levels of mp3 encoding no matter what.
Topic: Sharing MP3 sourced recordings (Read 3622 times)