MarkO

I've currently got an archive of about 28Gb of MP3 files - mostly ripped from my own CD collection. I'm thinking of converting all of them to WMA files, to save a bit of disk space.

So, my question is what's the best conversion tool from MP3 to WMA? I want something that's free.

Also, when doing the conversion, is it a lossless conversion? i.e., will the resulting WMA files be as good as if I'd ripped direct to WMA, or will the process require the music to be unencoded/recoded, thus losing info in the process? If it's not lossless, I'll leave them as they are...

MarkO

Okay, so I've answered my own questions here. I found a decent free converter called dbPowerAmp which can batch-convert MP3s to WMA format.

Also, after trawling the archives at WinAmp's forums, I've found some posts confirming that converting from MP3 to WMA will indeed require unencoding and re-encoding, meaning a further loss of quality. Since I can't be bothered to go through and re-rip everything to WMA format, I'll just leave it as-is and live with the slightly larger disk space requirement.

Manual

Does anyone have a licence key for this software?

dbailey

Hi Mark,
Windows XP Plus pack has an MP3 tto WMA converter. Don't BUY the plus pack just for this though as the rest of its rubbish. This does also assume that you are running Windows XP. If not, then ignore the above.

As for the serial number, try downloading a program called Serials 2000. :-) This is updated a couple of times a year with loads of different keys and serial numbers. Wouldn't like to say how legal some of them are though?

MarkO

Yeah, thanks. I'd seen that one, but whilst I'm running XP on my laptop, the machine with any decent CPU power to do the conversions is my work NT4 box.

However, it's all academic anyway, since the act of decoding/re-encoding during the MP3->WMA conversion would throw away enough info to make the conversion pointless.

I've solved the problem now by fitting a 60Gb drive to my laptop - so I don't care how big the MP3s are.

rik1471

You will care when they approach 60GB

MarkO

Well, by that time I'll have double the number of albums I have now. Given the time it'd take to download or rip that many albums (I've done all the ones I own) I think I'll have a new laptop with a 120Gb drive in it by then.