Hi guys,
I have a sizable music collection, mostly in MP3. I do however have a few ogg and wma files. Now rumor has it that my girlfriend wants to buy me an iPod for my birthday and the program I use to manage my music (madman) only supports mp3. I have searched high and low for an encoder. The best I have found is Soundconverter which does not support mp3. Most everything I see is a ripper, which I do not need. Prefferably I would like something that can do whole directories at once, I just want it to be flexible from format to format. Any advice you guys can toss my way would be great.

I use lame.

LAME(google for it). I've got it working, but it's not in the official debian repos. It might be in the Ubuntu, check out http://www.emcken.dk/weblog/archives...nd-Juicer.html for information on setting up sound juicer(however it is a ripper). GRIP might just re-encode, I'm not sure, but lame is what you need for mp3 encoding.

And then with lame I work from the command line? What would the syntax be?

lame [options] <infile> <outfile>

I normally do something like:

lame -b 128 -q 0 somefile.wav somefile.mp3

-b is the bit rate, q is quality where 0 is the best and 9 is the worst.

do 'man lame' to get the full options list.

I use

lame -h -v -V 4 blah.wav blah.mp3

you'd need to do ogg -> wav etc first

To re-encode from OGG to WAV, I'd use this:
Then, use the above commands to re-encode to MP3.

be careful encoding from mp3 to other formats, they all use different ways of deciding what to discard from the tracks and you can end up with your sound quality getting worse.

Is there a way to use Lame to do a whole directory at once?

You can also use ogg2mp3 (http://amor.cms.hu-berlin.de/~h0444y2j/linux.html) There are instructions on using it in the forum (search for ogg2mp3)
Kevin

There is ogg2mp3 in Gentoo portage, it's a perl script.

ogg2mp3 homepage

Couple of minutes late.

I tried using lame, but what I got was static, and lots of it. I was trying to convert some WMA files, which I have since learned were DRM'd, the other files I needed to convert were in FLAC format, those also produced static. I found a Windows application I can run with Wine, but I would much prefer to do it all natively in Linux.

I use lame all the time and never get static... make a wav first... see if it's static.

Thats an affirmative. Tried a wav first, and static