Mp3 to Wav then to Mp3 again...alternative

[countryfan_nt]

Hello Audacity / podcast / sound editing experts,

I have finished recording some audio spoken podcast (no music), I made a serious silly mistake, I recorded the raw files on MP3 instead of WAV.

A. Here are the specs:
* Format: MP3. * Program Used: Audacity. * Bit Rate: 320kbps. * Audio Sample Rate: 44KHz.

I want to use Audacity 1.3.13 to:

A. Convert the MP3 to WAV, so that I apply Levelator to the WAV, the convert it again to MP3 for uploading.
B. I will change the bit rate from 320 to 96.

The problem is I am hearing the that the recording quality will suffer a lot.
1. Is there any way that I can avoid the deterioration of the recording quality?
2. I need to do levelator to enhance the output of the recording of the Raw files, is there a better solution?
3. Please note the raw files, still did not go thru the noise removal, click removal yet.

I kindly need your help in guide me, to ensure that the sound quality is really good & to utilize all available tools/features.

All your suggestions are really needed and seriously appreciated.

Thank you very much in advance.
DeeDats

[steve]

Audacity only works with uncompressed data, so decoding and re-encoding is unavoidable in this case.
Fortunately your source MP3 files are in the highest MP3 quality, so the damage so far will be pretty small and should not pose any serious problem.

When you export your final mix as 96kbps MP3, it would be a good idea to also export a WAV or FLAC copy as a back-up just in case you need to make any further changes.

96kbps is a low quality, high compression format so I guess that this is for a podcast or similar. For the best sound quality at 96kbps, ensure that all tracks in the project are mono before you export. To do this you can select all tracks in the project (Ctrl+A) then select "Mix and Render" from the tracks menu. If this produces a stereo track, use "Tracks > Stereo Track to Mono".