Drawbacks
The key drawback of transcoding in lossy formats is decreased quality. Compression artifacts are cumulative, so transcoding causes a progressive loss of quality with each successive generation, known as digital generation loss. For this reason, transcoding is generally discouraged unless unavoidable.
It is better to retain a copy in a lossless format (such as TTA, FLAC or WavPack for sound), and then encode directly from the lossless source file to the lossy formats required. For image and digital audio editing, one is advised to capture or save images in a raw or uncompressed format and edit (a copy of) that version, only converting to lossy formats for distribution.
Read more about this topic: Transcoding
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