Batch converting

paradisiac

paradisiac

paradisiac

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hi, i have got about 110GB of music, in random file formats, mainly MP3, WMA, FLAC. i was wondering, is there any app, that say i selected the whole lot of music (is on a complete drive on its own) i can mass convert them all to mp3, whilst deleting the original files, rather than go through every folder and converting then deleting them?
thanks
 
Foobar2000 has a feature to convert tracks to any format you specify. You do realise that converting from WMV to MP3 (lossy to lossy) is bad as is FLAC to MP3 (lossless to lossy). If you can afford a cheap 500gb hard drive rip everything into FLAC for archival use and convert to MP3 as and when needed.
 
Converting lossy to lossy loses quite a bit of quality even going from the same bitrates, there is no straight 320 - 320 lossy converts.
 
Auraomega said:
Converting lossy to lossy loses quite a bit of quality even going from the same bitrates, there is no straight 320 - 320 lossy converts.
Click to expand...

so would it be best to :
A) leave as is and find a player to play all types (MP doesnt seem to like some of them)
B) convert it all to FLAC
C) spend hours re-ripping my cds
 
No point in converting lossy files to FLAC, that won't bring the quality back.

My setup is basically a hard drive dedicated to music; all my music is in FLAC except for the stuff which has only ever been released as MP3. For my MP3 player I use a Sansa Clip+ with Rockbox which allows me to play FLAC files, however I usually just get Foobar to create MP3s from my FLAC files when it comes to transferring them over.

It took me about a month to re-rip all my albums, it's certainly not something to be taken lightly but once they are in FLAC there is absolutely no reason for you to ever rip them again as they will be at CD quality (or more if using vinyl), should you need to convert to a format to play on a PMP then you can create MP3s from the FLAC. FLAC is mainly an archival format because you can create any format from it.
 
ok thanks. dont really want to re-rip all my cds, but future ones i will do in FLAC. i have a 500GB HDD for music, and like i said only 110GB at most is used, so space isnt a problem, its more having the time to do it, and having a media player that will play all my different formats.
 
The way I did it was to dedicate an hour a day to rip the tracks, you can get through a fair few during that hour.

Anything that can use Rockbox will play pretty much any audio format you throw at it.
 
paradisiac said:
ok thanks for your help, will give it a go. what do you use for ripping cds, and are there different quality FLAC files?
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Use EAC (Exact Audio Copy) to rip your CDs for best quality. It's not as straight forward to use as other rippers but once you've done the initial setup it's just a few clicks to rip a CD. There are plenty of guides out there on how to do this initial setup, takes just a few minutes.

FLAC does have compression levels, but they don't affect the end sound quality as it is a lossless format. The lower the compression level, the less CPU resources it takes to decode, but even at max compression level it hardly uses any CPU time.
 
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