File Quality

Media Editor only edits files in WAV format. This means that if you want to edit an MP3 file, it must first be decoded to a WAV file and then encoded back to an MP3 file after the editing is complete. Media Editor will do this for you automatically. However, each time a file is encoded or decoded, you lose sound quality. So, if you take an MP3 file and then edit it, you have already compromised sound quality twice.

One way to reduce loss of quality is to rip your audio CDs directly to WAV files first using Media Center. Do your editing on the WAV files with Media Editor, and then encode them to .MP3 or the desired format. This way, you are only compressing the file once and this limits loss of quality.

Of course, if you edit MP3 files, you don't have this option. But if you do edit them, just make sure you keep the decoded WAV files until you're done, and encode only once.