Convert mp4 Youtube video to lossless audio file
Reply #17 –
...if I understand the issues with lossy to lossy conversion correctly.
No, you don't.
Once again, lossless=lossless=lossless...loss...less...no loss...etc.
Any lossy->lossy process necessarily involves an intermediate "lossless" step, i.e. the source lossy file MUST be decompressed to straight PCM, and then that PCM data is encoded into a new lossy file.
Whether that intermediate PCM data is stored in a RAM buffer or as a lossless file on a disk, it is the exact same data (barring memory or disk corruption, of course) and it must exist.
As such:
lossless to lossy to lossy, a lossy to lossless to lossy,
are one and the same, assuming that the first lossy file in the second process was encoded from the same lossless file at the beginning of the first process.
edit: Wow, strange things are indeed afoot at the Circle K...dv1989 and I posted essentially the exact same answer one minute apart...which should give you some idea of how often this issue comes up...I think it's something like n+1 .