Quality comes first! wma to mp3 conversion

[Aninymouse]

As a general rule, I hate the .wma format. However, a friend of mine recently gave me about three albums worth of really sick shit from a friend of his that DJs around his college.

My question is probably buried deep within the archives of the vast OCR forums, but alas, the search function slaps me in the face if I try to querry 3-character words.

Help a brotha out, y'all; what program can I use to convert .wma to .mp3 without much loss to quality? Peace.

[FiremanJoe]

There's no way around it. Lossy to lossy conversion is always going to result in a bad output. The best you can hope for is converting to a high quality mp3, such as 320kbps or variable bitrate. Use the LAME encoder and the frontend Razorlame.

[Aninymouse]

Well, I knew about the loss and all, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to ask if there was anything out there in the way of an advancement or what have you.

But yeah, I wanna thank ya for the tip. I'd heard of LAME before but I hadn't looked into it. I'm setting everything up now, so hopefully everything will go smoothly.

[Aninymouse]

Alright. I have LAME & RazorLAME at this point but it doesn't want to do anything with wma files, so...

Unless someone else has some wisdom around here, I'm gonna hit up their website and ee what I can see...

[Aninymouse]

Alright, for as cool as LAME is for encoding mp3s, it can't handle windows media. the kind people over at razor suggested either dbPowerAmp or foobar2000. I chose dbPowerAmp, but it looks like the encoder component is evaluation-only (30-dy trail) so who knows if i'll have a use for it come December.

I'd say this has turned out to be a very educational hur for me, and I can see where this kind of info would be helpful in a sticky someplace around here, especially considering the community we're all taking part in.

[Darkness Lite]

Either Audacity w/ the Lame plugin, or

dBpoweramp

Whichever you choose, both should work well for you.