Salvaging audio from mp3? (1 Viewer)

[portrid]

Supposing you lost all your original music files/wavs and all you had left was mp3 versions - is there any hope of converting them into useable/releasable material? I know you could maybe overdub some parts but any other tricks for boosting/expanding the audio or effectively "uncompressing" mp3 back into wavs?

This is for a friend who lost years of stuff thanks to London's briefly fashionable looting craze...

 

[Goodbye]

You can't put the bits that were taken out in compression back in.

What's the bitrate of the mp3's?

 

[dudley]

afraid not.
you can certainly resave it as a wav, but it'll never sound better than what it was reduced to.

what kps of mp3? I think most people, unless using great systems, can't tell the difference between a 320kps mp3 and a wav

 

[lemonbravo]

no is the short answer.
You can convert back to wav, but you won't gain any quality. You can't undo the effects of the mp3 conversion.
You could tweak them then in wav format of course, but you can't ever go back to the state(quality wise) the were prior to conversion to mp3.

 

[portrid]

I'd hazard a guess they're 128s. Saving as wav would be the first step I guess, but say for example you then added the tiniest bit of reverb or whatever - would that fill in some of the blanks? Polishing a turd I know...

 

[Goodbye]

128's yikes.

Polishing a turd is right.

 

[lemonbravo]

The high end is probably where you'll hear the worst effects of compression, hi_hats etc suffer a lot.
Tweak/polish away, reverb, eq, whatever, if it sounds better, it sounds better.
Just try and get it to sound like you want it to sound, if it doesn't, then re-record.

 

[Scientician 0.8]

If they're 128 you haven't a hope. Even 196 isn't too bad.