I work for a company that sells (legally) music. We want to offer our music in as many formats for our customers as possible. Instead of uploaded tons of different versions of each of our songs, I want our server to be able to convert the audio from WAV to whatever format the customer wants.

What I want to know is... does anyone know of a way to encode from WAV to various NON-LINUX formats ON a linux machine?

I am not necessarily looking for FREE software, although that is obviously better! But, as this is a commercial project, I am willing to pay for these codecs if that is required.

Specifically, it would be great to encode from WAV to any of the following file formats:
AIFF
SWF
WMA
AAC

Please understand that I have not put tons of research into looking for these codecs - so I apologize if some of them have obvious answers. But I was hoping that some experienced linux users could point my in the right direction. (It's been my experience that asking for a flash light in the dark from someone who has one is better than tripping over furniture just because you think there might be one in the drawer!)

One more thing... I do not need to PLAY any of these on a linux machine, just encode them.

Thanks in advance!

You might want to look at the sox package. Most distros have it, although you may need to obtain it from a different repository for support for some formats such as mp3. It is a swiss army knife of audio sample conversion. It can also filter and resample your WAV files so you can avoid aliasing distortion when converting to a lower bitrate. ( Remember the Nyquist theorom. )

Also try searching sourceforge and freshmeat for other projects. Here is the home page of a script that will convert between WAV, Ogg, MP3, MPC, FLAC, APE, AAC, and WMA files. They claim that it will also run from a shell. The actual conversion is probably done by the dependency programs.
http://freshmeat.net/projects/audio-convert/

Also look at the mplayer (mencoder) documentation.

Some sound files are actually container files which in turn contain audio streams. The streams inside the file are what the codec works with and there may be a list of codecs and compression schemes to choose from. Just enter "mplayer -ac help" to get an idea on the audio codecs that the audio stream in a video might contain. This is probably why you want to perform conversion from a raw format in the first place.

However, you may find that the conversion process is too power hungry and slow to do repeatedly and it would be better after all to convert them once with a script and store the various files on the server. You might simply need to limit the choices available, in bitrates and use what is best supported. For example, wma formats that older windows players can play instead of one that version 9 uses and others for older versions. Drive space is a lot cheaper than processor cycles.

Try audacity with the plugins. It works very well. I have use it for AIFF and WMA as well as mp3<>wav

-=terry(Denver)=-

Thanks so much for being quick and detailed with your replies. I do appreciate that a lot.


I will look into the the encoders that you have mentioned and I will post back to this thread as soon as I can.

Just one note though:
I know that Audacity is a gui audio editor - does anyone know if it works from a command line too?

Thanks again.

NO

"The only command-line arguments Audacity takes are the names of audio files to open. Audacity currently uses libsndfile to open many uncompressed audio formats such as WAV, AIFF, and AU, and it can also be linked to libmad, libvorbis, and libflac, to provide support for opening MP3, Ogg Vorbis, and FLAC files, respectively"

Ciao

-=terry(Denver)=-

Yeah, I realized that after checkout out their website more.

But, thanks to you guys, I've found my answers.

I CAN convert from WAV to AIFF, MP3, OGG, FLAC, AU, and even SWF. (I found a neat piece of software that converts directly from WAV to SWF and runs on linux, mac, and windows.)

I think we will just not offer our media in WMA - we can just provide directions on our site to help people do that conversion them selves if they really need that format. (Same goes for AAC.)

Thanks to all who pointed my in the correct direction.