Looking for a conversion program.

[Lorn]

So, here's the situation.

I have a good sized music library, to the tune of about 34GB.

Some of this library is in .MP3 format.

However, some of it, from when I used CDs instead of Amazon, is in .WMA format. My phone cannot play .WMA files, and my netbook (running Ubuntu) is also not so much of a fan.

There's a total of about 5650 .WMA files in about 500 different folders.

I would like these to be .MP3 files.

I've googled and bing'd and Yahoo! searched for a decent batch file converter, to no avail. Any I find will do one folder at once, and with about 500 folders, this really isn't an option.

This is going to be a one time thing, a convert and then done. Happy to leave the computer working overnight doing it if need be. I'm reasonably fluent with .bat files, so a command line program would be absolutely fine.

Having looked for a while to no avail, I figured I might as well turn to the Playground and see if someone could help.

Does anyone know of a decent (and ideally free program) that'd let me convert the .WMA files to .MP3, preserving artist/album info and without losing quality - without having to manually go through every single folder of .WMA files?

Thanks.

[Gwyn chan 'r Gwyll]

So, here's the situation.

I have a good sized music library, to the tune of about 34GB.

Some of this library is in .MP3 format.

However, some of it, from when I used CDs instead of Amazon, is in .WMA format. My phone cannot play .WMA files, and my netbook (running Ubuntu) is also not so much of a fan.

There's a total of about 5650 .WMA files in about 500 different folders.

I would like these to be .MP3 files.

I've googled and bing'd and Yahoo! searched for a decent batch file converter, to no avail. Any I find will do one folder at once, and with about 500 folders, this really isn't an option.

This is going to be a one time thing, a convert and then done. Happy to leave the computer working overnight doing it if need be. I'm reasonably fluent with .bat files, so a command line program would be absolutely fine.

Having looked for a while to no avail, I figured I might as well turn to the Playground and see if someone could help.

Does anyone know of a decent (and ideally free program) that'd let me convert the .WMA files to .MP3, preserving artist/album info and without losing quality - without having to manually go through every single folder of .WMA files?

Thanks.

Mediamonkey maybe? I can't remember if it'll do it in batch...

[JoshL]

I use FreeRIP http://www.freerip.com/ Works pretty well (I'm usually converting .wavs) and does batches.

[valadil]

So I've got a shell script I've been working on. It's for batch converting audio files in linux. I don't have wma support yet, but the whole point of the script is that it's pretty easy to add support if I can find a decoder. (An encoder would be nice too, but who really cares about making new wma files?)

Anyway, if you can find a command line app for decoding (not just playing, I need to write to stdout) .wma files, I could take a stab at adding support. The wma equivalent of mpg321 would be ideal. Or you can take a stab at it yourself: https://github.com/sagotsky/.dotfiles/blob/master/scripts/transongrify.sh

[valadil]

Actually ignore my script. ffmpeg will do this just fine on its own as long as you have w32codecs or w64codecs.

Try this on your ubuntu machine, replacing /tmp/ with the path to your files:

find /tmp/ -iname '*.wma' 2>/dev/null | while read wma
do ffmpeg -i "$wma" "${wma%.*}.mp3"
done

Also, I've been posting here for almost 8 years and I'm thrilled to finally use that code tag, even if I'm not posting php.