[vorbis] MP3 Conversion

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Thu, Nov 09, 2000 at 07:48:23PM -0800, Pedriana, Paul wrote:
>    >>You shouldn't do that. Converting mp3 to 
>    >>vorbis can ONLY decrease the quality. 
> 
> No doubt the people who want to do this have the 
> sound file in no other usable format. They have 
> no choice. Since MP3 has legal issues, they may
> very well stand to benefit from such a conversion
> when there are no alternatives. No need to 
> criticize them for being in this predicament.

It might be a good idea to define a standard comment to denote oggs which
were created in this manner and make a standard script or app for conversion
so there is a good chance such files will be tagged.

With MP3, if you obtain a lame/FhG encoded file at 160kbit/sec, you can
expect reasonably transparent quality. If you are given a bladeenced file
at the same bitrate, it will likely not sound very good (at least to me it
doesn't!).
 
With Vorbis we are simplifying issues by tagging the encoder in the
comments, but we can't auto-magically tag the source in a general case (i.e.
ripped by someone who doesn't care enough to use cdparanoia).

We can, however, provide the means to transcode mp3 with nice yellow and red
"Your quality will suffer!" and a comment in the file.

>    >>It's a very bad idea.
> 
> A bit of an overstatement, perhaps. "Very bad" implies
> system crashes, illegal activity, or similar. 

IANAL, but,

Actually, if FhG were intent on suing you, they could probably argue that 
mp3encode -> mp3decode -> vorbisencode -> oggfile. Makes the patented mp3
technology a integral part of the resulting file and subject to their
downloading fees considering there is no obvious way to achieve identical
results (identically bad, that is).

Of course this would be stupid and would probably fail in court. But it's
not much more stupid then their claim that they can charge per download, and
it's equally likely that it will make more financial sense to roll over then
fight it for many companies. 

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