Ahoy there mateys:
Recently i was given an ipod shuffle as a birthday gift (thanks mysfyt) and noticed i have alot of Older files i had ripped when i first got this pc. In my infinite wisdom, i have much in the WMA format, and now need these to be mp3’s/aac. I got Xilisoft’s audio conversion software, but i have found that while it worked transmuting my music, it did not retain the id3 tag info. so two question:
1-Know any good software that can convert WMA to MP3/AAC that will also keep the id3 tag info from the WMA file?
2-I realize that they are all lossy formats, but which format would you choose? AAC or MP3? (note: all WMA files i am speaking of range from 160kbps-192kbps)
Ahoy there mateys:
Recently i was given an ipod shuffle as a birthday gift (thanks mysfyt) and noticed i have alot of Older files i had ripped when i first got this pc. In my infinite wisdom, i have much in the WMA format, and now need these to be mp3’s/aac. I got Xilisoft’s audio conversion software, but i have found that while it worked transmuting my music, it did not retain the id3 tag info. so two question:
1-Know any good software that can convert WMA to MP3/AAC that will also keep the id3 tag info from the WMA file?
2-I realize that they are all lossy formats, but which format would you choose? AAC or MP3? (note: all WMA files i am speaking of range from 160kbps-192kbps)
thanks in advance.
You should be able to put those sound files into iTunes and then go to “ADVANCED” and pick the “CONVERT INTO MP3” option. that should keep all of your Info too.
Make sure your import is set to MP3. You do that by going to the EDIT then clicking on the Advanced tab thenfrom there click the IMPORT USING then select MP3 you can also select your Quality setting 192 kbps etc
Late,
grmpysmrf
i wouldn’t recommend converting wma to mp3 because that is double transcoding/compressing, and by converting already lossy compressed files into another lossy compression format you’ll only make them sound shittier.
if these wma’s are something you own on cds, i’d recommend re-ripping them again into mp3s (preferably using eac + lame mp3 encoder), but if majority of wma files are something you can’t otherwise get in mp3 format, then what the hell, go for the conversion.
your iTunes solution is a good one, except when i use the import feature, it seems i can only do one file at a time, and i’m looking at around 9 gigs of music i need imported.
mebbe i could clear the library, add the folders containing the copies of the music i want imported so that the only tracks in the library are the ones to convert, then select them all and right click > convert to mp3?
oh and gila, your words do not fall of deaf ears. i have the luxury of extra space (atm, heh) so i’ll be keeping my original rips for burning, listening at home, etc, but i want these mp3’s for me new toy. i hadn’t thought about them being doubly compressed, thus doubly shitty(er)
yea extra space is awesome, i’m using .flac now for listening music on pc. it’s lossless after all. and oh yeah, someday maybe i’ll get like 30gb iriver-usb-hdd based player and install rockbox on it to support flacs, replaygain, gapless playback and shitloads of other neat features.
A pretty decent audio conversion program for the PC is dBpoweramp (http://www.dbpoweramp.com/) although I am not sure how it handles converting from wma to mp3… Still, you might want to check that out. Personally, I use BonkEnc (http://www.bonkenc.org/) due to the fact that it has a LOT of advanced options and allows me to rip/convert just the way I like it. I am not sure if BonkEnc supports wma though.
I would personally recommend converting to mp3 using one of the latest builds of LAME. AAC/MP4 is more a container format than anything else and the sound compression itself is not much different than mp3.
dBpoweramp is what I use. It does a great job, can be upgraded to handle pretty much any format, is free, and preserves id3 tags (at least when converting mp3 to mp3, I assume it’ll do the same for wma as well)