WMA to MP3!

[phil_stockham]

i have used windows media to get a literally hundreds of albums onto my hard drive. But it has stored the tracks as WMA files and my ipod being an mp3 player does not recognise the tracks. is there anyway to convert the thousands of trcks in one go or to get the ipod to play wma files as it'll take me ages to cenvert the files one by one!

[GeorgeC]

You can use free dBpowerAMP with free WMA codec (both available at http://www.dbpoweramp.com/) to perform conversion. It can convert individual or multiple files.

However, keep in mind that with each conversion you loose some sound quality. To avoid that, you may want to consider re-doing your CD's, but this time directly to MP3...

Cheers,

[cgannon64]

And use CDex to copy CDs from now on, you can copy them directly as mp3s.

[Hewt]

i had the same problem and used;
http://www.litexmedia.com/wma_workshop/
you can cue up all the songs you want to copy and it does it automatically, so you can leave it over night...
costs a bit ($25) but worth it for all the stress of burning onto cd and reripping to preserve little bit extra sound quality. there is a free demo, that allows you to cue up 5 at a time, so it you think that the sound quality sucks when you change format you don't have to buy it?

just make sure you don't lose the id3 tags for the tracks

[kornchild2002]

I would re-rip everything using iTunes to the AAC format. If you convert your wma files to mp3, a great loss of sound quality will occur. I tried this once and the files were pretty bad, the hi-hats from the drumms sounded slury and everytime any singer sang s it came out shshshsh. The AAC format is really good and a 128 AAC sounds the same or better than a 192 mp3. If you don't want to convert to AAC then mp3 at least 192. I would use iTunes to re-rip everything, it is easy to use and fast and makes good quality music files.

[manutd]

Agreed,

iTunes is by far the best way to go for ripping your cd's into AAC.
Which makes the most sense if you are going to be using an iPod.

good luck.

[saratoga]

Originally posted by Hewt
i had the same problem and used;
http://www.litexmedia.com/wma_workshop/
you can cue up all the songs you want to copy and it does it automatically, so you can leave it over night...
costs a bit ($25) but worth it for all the stress of burning onto cd and reripping to preserve little bit extra sound quality. there is a free demo, that allows you to cue up 5 at a time, so it you think that the sound quality sucks when you change format you don't have to buy it?

just make sure you don't lose the id3 tags for the tracks

Paying for software that does the same thing a dozens of free programs is pretty dumb. Get foobar/dbpoweramp/mediacenter/MS's free tools/whatever.