mp3 question

I was wondering if music encoded into MP3 format actually physically degrades the music or can it be converted into a higher quality and retain it's original sound.

MP3 has several different qualities, I found that importing them into wc3 with MPEG1, Layer 3, 128kbps, Sterio shrinks the file size, and you won't be able tell much of a difference in wc3. You can set it to 192kbps and that should work extremely well, dont go into the 2 or 3 hundred range, its just useless.

It also depends on if you are converting from another sound format or not, and the format of the sound before conversion can slightly alter the after-effects. (Not too sure though, some places says the original format has no effect on the converted format, but sometimes you can just notice a difference.)

MP3 compression is lossy-type. It loses information when compressed.

It's possible to use .wav formats in Wc3 right? The only problem with this is a full song may be 20-40Mb.. most people wouldn't wanna download a 21mb map that has a 20mb song in it.

Considering that the max size for a bnet map is 4mb, I don't consider .wav format music a possibility. Sure you can encode it at a lower bitrate but mp3's compression is much more efficient.

The only reason that you'd want to use .wavs is if you've got lots of small files that are played very often. MP3s need to be decoded before playing and doing that with lots of sounds can hurt the computer.

In any case, at its lowest quality i've managed to get a MP3 of White Stripes' Seven Nation Army to 300kb.