WMA to MP3 conversion

[funkyboogalooo]

Can anyone help. Have just bought a PDA and want to use it for mp3 playing as a personal hi-fi. I have copied a lot of my cd's to my pc but now need to convert them to MP3. Can someone tell me how please? Also how to I get the highest bitrate as I want the best quality I can get.
Ta
Mike

[tvrforever]

I use this for converting WMA 9 to MP3 for the car cd player :-

www.litexmedia.com/

Works so well I actually paid for the full version of 'Audio Conversion Wizard' - v1.65 is very stable and works very well (v1.73 beta has a couple of niggles)

Recommended

Cheers

Ian

[chrisjl]

funkyboogalooo said:

Also how to I get the highest bitrate as I want the best quality I can get.

The conversion from CD to WMA will already have reduced the quality. Converting WMA to MP3 can only make it worse. The bitrate of the WMAs is your new starting point - converting a 96kbps WMA into a 256kbps MP3 is still going to sound like a 96kbps WMA. IT's time to dig the CDs out and re-encode from the source.

[arcturus]

chrisjl said:

The conversion from CD to WMA will already have reduced the quality. Converting WMA to MP3 can only make it worse. The bitrate of the WMAs is your new starting point - converting a 96kbps WMA into a 256kbps MP3 is still going to sound like a 96kbps WMA. IT's time to dig the CDs out and re-encode from the source.

On the other hand, if the wma is at 192kbps and the mp3 is only going to be 128kbps, i'd say it's worth a go rather than re-ripping from scratch.

I use dBpoweramp to convert; it's very good and free. www.dbpoweramp.com

Indeed I have just tried a 192kbps wma to 128kbps mp3 and it sounds just fine. Certainly wouldn't re-rip from the cd. IMHO of course.

And don't forget that wma offers the same quality at a lower bitrate. Thus a 192kbps wma is probably equivalent to a 256kbps mp3.

>> Edited by arcturus on Monday 30th August 17:16

[cdp]

The Lame MP3 ripper is very good.

http://lame.sourceforge.net/

It allows you to convert from wmf to mp3, wav etc and works well in conjuction with winamp (from which it can borrow codecs).

The windows version is easy to use as well.

[arcturus]

cdp said:

The Lame MP3 ripper is very good.

Concur - It is the Lame ripper that is use in dBpoweramp.

[cdp]

Actually, if you are looking for stored (rather than streamed) media the variable bit rate encoding is excellent in Lame.