Can mp3 files lose their kbps when burning?
 

This may seem like a dumb question, but if you burn mp3s to a CD as a data CD, and not a music CD, and say the bitrate for the file is 450kbps. If you burn it and copy it back onto your computer, will it lose bitrate or will it still be the same?

No if the Mp3 is burnt as an mp3, and there are no read errors when copying back to the PC, the file *will* be exactly the same file you burned to the CD. If that didn't happen, then we'd be screwed, because data CDs are supposed to always return bit-perfect results.

Exactly. If you burn the file as a data file, it's the same as copying it to another Hard Drive or Flash drive and no data (and thus no quality) is lost. If you burn it as an audio track and re-rip it, yes, quality will be lost, because some quality is always lost in every conversion.

Very strange.

My HD crashed recently, so I put in a new temp hard drive.

Most gamemp3 releases I had clocked the kbps at like 450-500 kb/sec on that hard drive.

The soundtracks I burned ad data CDs, max out at 320 kb/sec now.

Maybe my computer with my old HD was just reading them wrong?

You're not making any sense. I don't know of any mp3s that go past 320kbps. I don't get how you could have ever seen that.

It was probably just the computer then. I don't know the cause.

What Eleo said. MP3s have a limit of 320K/s. Either you were playing lossless files without realizing it or your player was misreading them.

There's an explanation, actually.
If he is using Windows Media Player, for example, it cannot clock VBR MP3s properly, and will misreport their bitrates rather greivously. For example, APS MP3s can come out anywhere from 300 to around 2000 K/s, under it (when factually it's much less).

Lots of mp3 decoding programs have that issue. My mp3 player in fact detects the length of a song by calcualting filesize vs. the bitrate of the first second of audio, since most VBR songs start out at 32kbps, you know how that'll end up.

Use a program like Winamp or foobar2000, they can correctly determine the bitrate of an un-corrupted mp3. If your mp3s play back all the way without any audible glitches (or error messages), chances are there are no problems with the file.

You should download winsfv, and check the files using the .sfv file that #gamemps provides with every release. That way, you can know for certain whether the process of burning them changed the files.

Hopefully, you don't make a habit of deleting the sfv files....

SFV files would hardly ever help me out unfourtunately. I costantly retag and do other things to my mp3s that changes the CRC. If only people would Replaygain the mp3s for me.

Well, if you suspected that the same problem might happen to you, you could always make your own .sfv files.

Yeah, but I should really just get a hash database to store CRC/MD5 values. Frankly I think ZIPing or RARing the mp3s is the best way to insure if there is any compromise of data integrity.