MP3 to Ogg Conversion

[slugathor]

Hi everyone !

I start this tread to know, once for all, if is it possible to convert an MP3 audio file into an ogg one.

Why ? Well in fact only for ideological reasons . Im trying since a few years to eradicate the most of proprietary formats from my music library, and for now, I was downloading in flac, then encoding in ogg q8.
But sadly, for a lot of music I found on the great wibe web, it's only available in 320k mp3/vbr0.
So here is my question: Do you think I can reencode 320k mp3 into an ogg file, in quality level 5, without loosing quality ?

[el maco]

Originally Posted by slugathor

Do you think I can reencode 320k mp3 into an ogg file, in quality level 5, without loosing quality ?

Naturally you *can* transcode -- e.g. Winamp can do that -- but you will get twice the amount of compression artifacts, i.e. lose some (theoretical) quality. At high bitrates the compression artifacts are inaudible anyway so its completely possible that you won't notice a difference at all. But still, I would keep the mp3's intact just for peace of mind (I also prefer the non-proprietary Vorbis codec but I'm quite obsessed with sound quality sometimes so personally I won't transcode).