OGG to MP3 Conversion

[King of Heroes]

I have a Sandisk Sansa e250 that I'd like to start using at the gym, unfortunately it only plays MP3 and WMA files and I several .ogg tracks I'd like to use (don't worry, nothing illegal).

Does anyone know of a really good ogg to mp3 converter out there? Free if possible?

Also, what kind of quality degradation can I expect from such a conversion?

 

[Deleted member 89018]

Hmm. Does that e250 count as part of the e200 series that is compatible with Rockbox?

http://www.rockbox.org/

I was in a similar situation, though in my case it was with an iPod. Rather than try to find a new player or spend time converting the audio files to something it would recognize I just installed Rockbox. It plays pretty much everything.

 

[DefineByte]

It will work as long as it's a first generation model (which isn't always easy to tell). You can't harm anything by trying to install it anyway.

I use it on my iPod Video and it works superbly, especially with the recent(ish) battery life improvements.

 

[King of Heroes]

Hm, according to the Rockbox Status on the E200 port index the USB handler doesn't appear to be working correctly. It says the Sansa recognizes when the USB is plugged in, but does nothing else.

I don't have a wall socket charger yet, so I've been recharging via USB. If the USB handler doesn't operate as described, does that mean I can't recharge over USB with this firmware?

 

[phide]

LAME is generally the best "MP3" encoder, and 3.97 is the current stable version. Try the V5 or V6 setting for portable use. Degradation should be fairly minor if you transcode to similar or higher bit rates.

You can use dBpoweramp or foobar2000 to handle the conversion.

 

[DefineByte]

...does that mean I can't recharge over USB with this firmware?

The Rockbox boot loader supports dual booting so you can select the original firmware and charge from there (having said that I think Rockbox supports charging anyway, just not file transfers, although I may be mistaken).