Will this lower the audio quality of my mp3 music file?

[win3328]

If I open, edit, save my mp3 music file, doing this repeatedly many many times, and everytime I save the file I use the same setting "Layer-3, 44100 Hz, 128 kbps, stereo", will this lower the audio quality of the mp3 music file in the long run?

[Kummel]

It will indeed lower the quality, because any editing action means a re-encoding, and at each encoding, it seeks for harmonics to throw away.

[win3328]

Just to make sure, will it lower the audio quality of the UNTOUCHED part of the mp3 music file?

[Sarge]

Yes, it will lower the quality of the "untouched" parts as well (I assume you are referring to the parts that you didn't edit as "untouched"). Regardless if you edit the area or not, the whole file quality will be lowered.

If the file you are editing has to be in an .mp3 format for its final version, I would recommend that you save in a lossless format (such as .wav or .flac) and edit and save using that format until your final version. This way you can edit and save the audio without reducing the audio quality.

Sarge

[GoldWave Inc.]

You'd have to open, save, and close the file repeatedly for quality to degrade each time. If you open the file, it gets decompressed to a lossless format, so you can edit and resave it as many times as you like without it degrading each save. As long as you do not close and reopen the file, the lossless audio continues to be used.

The quality will be slightly lower than the original because the lossless audio is converted to MP3 in the end.

Chris