You can always dump it back to wav, fix the errors with Soundforge or something, and then re-encode it, but of course you lose some clarity that way.
A week ago I would have said you were crazy for even thinking of trying something like that -- the sound quality would be so bad that you'd be hard pressed to even tell what the song used to be after all that encoding/decoding/encoding generational loss.
But last week I had someone at the radio station where I work make me a copy of a hard-to-find song that I could put into my empeg player. The song had been converted from a .WAV file to a .MP2 file to go into the radio station's archives. My program director took that MP2 file, converted it to a .WAV file, and then converted it to a 128 kbps CBR .MP3 file. So by the time it made it to my headphones, it has gone from .WAV to .MP2 to .WAV to fairly low quality .MP3. Not exactly a recipe for top notch sound quality.
At this point, I realized that my empeg player could play .MP2 files natively, so I just copied the .MP2 from the radio station archive directly into my player. Now I had both the second-generation .MP2 file and the fourth-generation .MP3. I set up a playlist with three copies of each file in it, then set the playlist to randomize, turned "info" to transient, set the playlist to repeat, and listened to it for more than an hour. (What can I say--- I
like that song!)
No matter how carefully I listened I could NOT tell which of the two versions of the song was playing without hitting the mode select button on the remote to bring the transient display back up.
So... this makes me wonder if we are not being needlessly concerned about just what bit rate we use for encoding, and what version of EAC and Lame we use to rip and encode. Perhaps this MP3 format is more robust than we give it credit for being?
tanstaafl.