Sound file converters

D

Dave3d

Limp Gawd
Joined
Nov 7, 2007
Messages
260
Hello people.

I have about 4gb of music files, which I 'thought' I had WMP convert to mp3, but turns out I forgot to use the mp3 option. :(

I was wondering if you know of any GOOD batch converters out there.

I have already tried dbpoweramp, and most of the freeware apps, to no good result.
Either they only convert a few at a time, or they crash or just stop while converting (dbpoweramp crashes and just stops).

I am willing to pay for a good app, as long as it will BATCH convert, and convert to mp3 and to ipod format.

Thanx for any help.

Dave
 
That_Sound_Guy said:
What is the source file extension from the original music files?
Click to expand...

I would assume .wma?

OP, I hate to say it, but iTunes should be able to do it and its free. I use MediaMonkey as my player/organizer and it does it aswell, but only the Pro version. There might be a plugin for foobar2000 that might do it.
 
Originals were from regular cd's (old cd's, like from the 80's).

And they are now .wma.

Itunes would take forever, and it doesnt do batch does it?

I really dont want to spend another 30 hours doing it disk by disk (or song/song, or folder/folder) again.
 
dBpoweramp crashing sounds like either something to be posted about or brought up with the devs. It should work (has for me and I've done thousands of conversions with it form every and to every imaginable format)... care to post the details?

Do realize though that unless you're converting from a lossless source, it is not recommended to convert the files again.
 
Yes iTunes does batch.. you just import your library then select all the songs and convert.
 
Uhmmm... you went from CD native to wma format, and now you want to transcode the wma files to what... mp3? And what is this "ipod format" you speak of, probably aac but... iPods play mp3 files, so there is no "ipod format" by default. iTunes defaults to using AAC for encoding but that can be altered, if that's what you mean.

If you still have the original CDs, you need to re-rip that stuff to mp3 and do it right the second time as the first time was a pooch screw, it seems.

But transcoding lossy files to yet another lossy format is just asking for trouble and going deaf before your time. Bad, horrible... no, make that stupendously bad idea. :)

Break out the original CDs and get to work... EAC for ripping, LAME for mp3 encoding... ftw!

(having said that, if you're too lazy to re-rip from originals, and you absolutely must do the transcoding from lossy to lossy, foobar 2000 has a most excellent converter in it. You'd need to grab the wma playback plugin and then get the LAME encoder installed and wham.. as many songs as you want, converted, easily)
 
Joe Average said:
(having said that, if you're too lazy to re-rip from originals, and you absolutely must do the transcoding from lossy to lossy, foobar 2000 has a most excellent converter in it. You'd need to grab the wma playback plugin and then get the LAME encoder installed and wham.. as many songs as you want, converted, easily)
Click to expand...

As Joe said, going from lossy to another lossy format would be like killing the pope.. You should go to Hell. IF you believe in that sort of thing...

Anyway.

If it has to be done, Foobar2000 is a great (and fast) way to do it. I knew there was a way with fb2k but I wasn't sure, so I recommended iTunes as I was sure it could do it.
 
I hadn't done any transcoding (from my massive FLAC collection to LAME mp3) recently so I pulled out foobar2000 the other day and set it up to do the straight dope conversions. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it's now properly multithreaded meaning if you've got a dual/quad core machine now, it'll open up X number of threads based on the cores and do encoding twice as fast on a dual core or even 4x faster with a quad (one song/file per core).

As I was using my trusty HP "Business Class" laptop with a Core 2 Duo in it, was pretty awesome to see it hitting both cores with individual threads and the stuff I was doing got done twice as fast.

I'm currently looking at building myself a new "Godbox" that's quad core powered so this'll come in handy later on.
 
What LAME library does it use specifically? I loaded up the newest LAME in Audacity to play with MP3 encoding and it only ever used 40-60% of my CPU. (Q6600). Is there a specifc multi-threaded version of LAME? I have been looking to take advantage of all 4 cores for MP3 conversion.

I use MediaMonkey for my player/collection organizer (in my experience nothing else even comes close in its ability to manage massive library's) and it has LAME built it but only uses one thread. FWIW I have tried foobar2k as my main app for library management and to be honest its just way to un-finished feeling. I know you have to install components to get the functionality you want, but there is just to many useless features that end up leading to confusion. MM has all the features you could want out of the box and does a damn good job at completely organizing my 10,000+ song library.
 
There is a multithreaded version of LAME available, but IIRC it's not recommended as the bit reservoir is disabled, giving a lower quality at otherwise similar settings to the single-threaded version.

You can just point foobar2000's converter at a plain old lame.exe executable (3.98.2 is the latest recommended release, get it from www.rarewares.org), and it will run as many concurrent instances as you have cores available. :)
 
I knew someone would misunderstand what I was saying... ;)

I don't mean the encoder is multithreaded, I mean foobar2000 actually creates separate threads and runs two (or four) encoders depending on the number of cores you have. What made me notice it was when I picked a directory of files, say 15 songs, and I told foobar2000 to start the encoding, it would show something like:

Now encoding (1,2 ->15 tracks) and as soon as those were done it changed to

Now encoding (3,4 ->15 tracks) etc

I had to take a minute to realize what it meant which was that it was encoding two songs at the same time, not one song with an encoder that's multithreaded (as LAME isn't). Believe me, as a very long time member of HydrogenAudio.org I've seen near-battles happen over people requesting a multithreaded version to speed up the encoding process and the developers screaming their lungs out in reply saying LAME isn't designed for that crap and it wouldn't scale with the number of threads/cores properly.

So, yeah... that's what I meant. I guess I should have said it will create multiple encoding threads, one per song you're encoding, and assign processor affinity to those so... it's hella faster, that's for sure.

I had a directory with ~275 songs in it (big variety folder) and fully expected it to take 30+ mins to encode on that C2D laptop - I started the process, turned my head to work on my desktop and I swear, it was like 7-8 mins and it was done. I was sure something went wrong and it just didn't finish but, amazingly, it had.

The second batch was where I caught that (1,2 ->15 tracks) thing and realized what it meant. If I had a quad core it would have shown:

(1,2,3,4 -> 15 tracks)
 
Thanx for all the info people.

I am really a noob at this, and didnt know double encoding would ruin the songs.

A couple things:

1. I am on XP 64. Does foobar run on this? Does any prog work on XP 64?
2. I have tried a bunch of different progs that made me download a bunch of crap to work (like foobar seems to do). Is there a prog that is like 'one button rip', that doesnt need to download flak and lame and a$$ and poop to work ? This is the reason I went with mediaplayer. It is just one button rip. I got overly confused by a lot of the programs I tried.
Also, some of the downloads gave me spyware, which is why I kind of want to go with a known company.

Thanx again.
 
Foobar doesn't give you spyware but it does take some time to setup, not to mention it is the best way to do this.

But if you really want a "one button" approach, iTunes will do it. Promptly delete it afterwards though ;)

And yes, all these apps run on XP64.
 
Dave3d said:
Thanx for all the info people.

I am really a noob at this, and didnt know double encoding would ruin the songs.

A couple things:

1. I am on XP 64. Does foobar run on this? Does any prog work on XP 64?
2. I have tried a bunch of different progs that made me download a bunch of crap to work (like foobar seems to do). Is there a prog that is like 'one button rip', that doesnt need to download flak and lame and a$$ and poop to work ? This is the reason I went with mediaplayer. It is just one button rip. I got overly confused by a lot of the programs I tried.
Also, some of the downloads gave me spyware, which is why I kind of want to go with a known company.

Thanx again.
Click to expand...
1. Yes, yes

2. If you really want a simple one-button kind of approach (which is fair enough), I agree you might honestly be better off sticking with iTunes. You can set it up to encode to mp3 by default, as someone mentioned above.

It's not my favourite app by a long shot - the lack of secure ripping, limited track info display options, and especially its habit of choking on large music libraries are all dealbreakers for me, but it it does what you want then why not. :)
 
1. Yep, it'll fun just fine, actually perform slightly better than on XP 32 bit.

2. If you want to do this "stuff" the right way and get the best quality, there is no one single app to do it, it requires a small amalgamation of interlocking parts (ok, I'm waxing poetic here) to get it done right with the best quality.

If you just want to rip your CDs to mp3 format with the least amount of hassles and fairly decent sound quality then my suggestion is to use iTunes, seriously. I hate the software, I really do, but for point-click-rip-stupid-ease-of-use, there's not much that can touch it. Change the default encoding method to mp3, choose the bitrate you want (anything less than 192 Kbps is not going to cut it, so don't bother with lower bitrates), and just stick with iTunes.

There are some other products but, iTunes is the easiest in my opinion. Install it, change the default encoder, set the bitrate, change the option to rip a CD when inserted and eject when done, and then it's just stick in a disc, wait, take the disc and put another in, wait, etc, till it's all done with your CD collection.

It doesn't get much easier than not even having to type anything unless you have some truly weird and obscure CDs that the track databases don't have a record of.

Good luck...

nick8571: Yah, I was, it wasn't meant seriously but sarcastically, hence the smiley there... I got the gist that you were referencing criccio's comment... ;)

And about the "secure" ripping thing, it's a waste of time more often than not. I've been using EAC since the day it came out and I've done thousands of rips with Burst and Secure, same discs, and then compared checksums - only a small handful of times out of thousands has there been a discrepancy. Secure just takes longer and really gives the exact same bits that Burst does on today's respectable ripping hardware.

I gave up on that crap years ago and every once in a while I'll do a Burst and Secure rip - the checksums are still identical so I just don't use it anymore. It's just one of those things that people latch on to thinking it's a good thing and I have to say it's a complete waste of time overall.
 
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