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program to batch reencode mp3?

Z

ziddey

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Dec 24, 2002
Messages
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I'd like to reencode all my mp3's (or most of them). First off, I'd like to take anything thats >192kbps and reencode them down to something like 160. I'd like to keep cbr 128 160 and 192 as is for now. And get rid of all vbr. Say if it can find the max (not sure if anyone encodes vbr with 192 as a max or if it goes up to say 320?) but recode to 160 or less if the max is less.

The problem I have with vbr is that a lot of my devices don't play them back properly and my countdowns for the songs are always fubar in most programs.

But my major concern is that I have too many songs >192, such that I'd be able to save over 1/3 of my space on my portable if I brought it down.

I've used a few programs before but am looking for one I could set these all as conditions and let it do it in a batch and be done with it. Ability to keep id3 tags and file names in tact would be greatly appreciated.
 
It's best to avoid transcoding one lossy audio. You'd get vastly superior results reripping the original CDs.
 
Why in the world would you want to LOSE quality in an encoded file by lowering the bitrate? Storage is cheap, and certainly cheap enough to offset any space savings gained by going throught the motions of re-encoding.

It honestly sounds like your VBR files may not have been made properly in the first place. Perhaps you would be better served, insteaad of re-encoding your files, to go back and rip them from CD again using a high quality encoding program. AudioGrabber maybe...
 
Agreed. Even my now ancient Nomad Jukebox II (that's the size of bricked cd player) plays vbr correctly. If your music is worth anything at all you should give quality some consideration. At similar bitrates a properly encoded vbr often sounds better than it's cbr counterpart, especially when used with the -alt-preset flags that set internal adjustments that can't be otherwise changed by command line. Not to mention the file size reduction.

Unless you're listening to Milli Vanilli on a cellphone speaker, it's probably to your advantage to re-rip and encode them correctly.

Personally, I can't stand many mp3's less than 192, I don't know how you could possibly stand to listen to 128 cbr... The cellphone speaker starts looking good at that point.
 
agent420 said:
Unless you're listening to Milli Vanilli on a cellphone speaker, it's probably to your advantage to re-rip and encode them correctly.
Click to expand...

Lol that sounds so bad i want to try it. Break some anti hi-fi barriers.
 
You risk being arrested in violation of a wide range of decency laws :D

I'll just take this opportunity to say this is another reason why archiving your tunz in lossless format (flac,ape, etc.) makes sense... you can always re-encode to any format without having to re-rip. Plus, with as fast as things change today, what guarentee do you have that the mp3 format will even be widely supported in 10 years?
 
I'm not trying to convert up obviously. But does reencoding from say 320 down to 160 really make it that much worse than from source or lossless to 160?
 
Yes, converting an encoded file to another bitrate will always be less desirable than simply encoding to the desired bitrate from source.

As I theorized above, though, I think that you have problems playing your music on some devices not because they are VBR files, but because they are improperly made VBR files. Trying to re-encode from a poor source will yield an even poorer result.

It simply doesn't make any sense to me that you want to lower the quality of your files to a lower bitrate. The space savings aren't justified when the low cost of storage is taken into account. Also, as technology progresses, you will only wish for even higher quality later, not lesser.

As agent420 aptly explained above, properly made VBR files actually sound better than CBR ones and take up less space. Instead of spending your effort re-encoding from a possibly questionable source to an even more questionable output, why not spend that effort and make new, high quality, encodings directly from CD without worrying about the storage space. In the long run, I'd bet you'll will be glad you did.
 
The price of storage being low is moot if the consideration is trying to fit more songs on a small fixed portable player.
 
Here's the situation. I had a 30gb 5g ipod that refused to charge (ipod thought the battery was full so it never charged). I had a hell of a time and hours on the phone to send it back to apple. Within a week they sent it back saying that I waterdamaged it (lie), broke the lcd (lie), and otherwise externally/internally damaged it (lie). Everything about it was fine and within normal wear and tear. Things just went way downhill after I had extreme bad luck with 4g ipods and then eventually lost one and had to buy another. This one never worked well from the start (constantly froze etc).

So now I have a 1gb rsmmc and want to fit more. I have a plug to put it to my car stereo so its ok
 
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