Help: wma to mp3 (gigs of the buggars)

Santa (the nice bloke he is) gave me an ipod classic this christmas.

Great, good stuff. The only problem is i have close to 100gigs of music, most of which is WMA. is there a program that can bulk convert the wma to mp3 without loosing any cd info? I have search the net, downloaded a few peograms but nothing seems to be working very well.

Any ideas, as i’m about to see if the dog likes apples…

cheers.

Yup; iTunes will (File > Add Folder to Library) and maintain the info – but converting from one compressed format to another may well result in loss of quality. Ideally, you’d re-rip from CD but can understand your reluctance if you’ve got hundreds of gigs..!

MediaMonkey is probably what you need. This will convert audio formats and keep tags and artwork correct. It can also be used to synchronise your wma files to your ipod and convert them on the fly – so you won’t have to convert them all manually and then add them to itunes. This would mean that you won’t be able/have to use itunes – to me this is an advantage.

The quality issue of converting from one lossy format to a different lossy format is another question entirely, and as househusband says, ideally you would rerip them.

Does iTunes not do this automatically? Or at least has the facility to convert the files?

Also, you can set the bitrate(quality) of the tracks. For playing on a hi-fi at home, higher bitrates are preferable (320kbps), but to be honest, you won’t need that quality on an iPod, as the playback through most earphones is not going to be anything like through a hi-fi. So, 128kbps will be fine. This will reduce the file size, too, and the music will still sound fine. If you are using very expensive headphones, maybe you’ll want higher quality, but then that kind of negates the portability and convenience of iPods.

I’m sure some hi-fi buff will be along to negate everything I’ve typed, however, and how they have everything ripped to high bitrate Ogg Vorbis files, and use £20,000 headphones with solid platinum connections, or some other such nonsense!

Just enjoy the music.

iTunes may do on the fly conversion, I don’t use it myself as I find it slow and irritating. If it does format conversions at the same speed it does everything else then it could take an awful long time to fill a 60/120gb Ipod classic.

As for bitrate, I’m no technophile but I can definitely tell the difference between 128kbps and say 192kbps. 128kbps really does seem to lose an awful lot of quality and introduce artefact to an unacceptable level resulting in music only suitable for listening to through earphones from Poundland. And when converting between lossy formats you should not try and increase the bit rate as this really does make for a whole world of pain for your ears.

spend some time picking the right mp3 conversion settings as you dont want to end up with poor files and have to do it all again.
choose a level that appropriately matches your wma files, if using high quality wma then mp3 lames v2 or v3 (variable) encoding setting should produce acceptable files, 128k, 192k would work too let you ears and size of files decide. remember a transcoded file will never sound better than the original, hence why using higher encoded files is pointless.

stay away from other proprietary codecs and DRM in the future unless you want to have to do this again.

Mr C, what happened to the Shamen?

Good points, but it’s a trade-off between quality and quantity. If you just want a load of music, to listen to on long journeys, etc, then 128kbps is fine. Certainly with the standard iPod earphones it is, anyway. It’s only with the more expensive noise canceling etc earphones, and hi-fi headphones, that the differences become apparent. I use a lot of 128kbps tracks, with a pair of standard budget earphones, and it’s fine. I’m not expecting hi-fi quality, when I’m sitting on a train.

Files ripped to 128kbps, from a decent source, sound as good as, if not better, than tunes ripped at a higher bitrate, from a crappy source. I think the variable bitrate setting (VBR) improves things a fair bit, without making the files too huge. Plus, if a lot of your music is older, pre digital studio recording, then the benefits of higher bitrate will be even less.

iPods are all about compromise, anyway. That’s the point. Have loads of music, wherever you go. In a small, easily portable form. I can happily listen to loads of stuff at 128kbps, without worrying about all the subtle nuances of the audio quality.

Like i said, just enjoy the music.

Thanks for your advice all, but i think my brain has gone to mush.

I have downloaded MediaMonkey and thought we were onto something there. But now i’m less sure. After much playing around, i think all i want to do is import my whole music collection over into itunes. Its currently sitting in folders on my external hard drive, mostly in wma format. I am at a loss as to how i get this music into the itunes library.

any help greatly recieved.

I think you can just drag and drop, the folders containing the tunes, into the iTunes window. If you’ve set the import preferences, then iTunes will automatically convert the files to whatever format you choose.

It’s actually a lot easier than it seems!

For conversions I’ve just started using this simple program Daniusoft MP3 WAV Converter.
CLICKY

Just to repeat the sensible comments above – there is a valuable lesson here about proprietary (wma and aac both translate in english as “locked” or “non-futureproof”) formats.

You will lose quality converting from WMA to MP3. You probably won’t notice on a portable unless you have decent headphones.

I would use besweet to do the conversion (but someone might know better). Try the guide/ comments here:

http://www.videohelp.com/tools/BeSweet

Good site for video / audio stuff on your PC in general btw. You will want the lame MP3 codec as per comments above. Not sure what you will need for AAC.