Save me from proprietary codecs...

July 13, 2007 7:27 AM

How should I convert about 7000 wma to a more compatible format?

Many years ago, when starting to rip my CDs, my codec of choice was wma. At the time it seemed wma offered better quality (to my ears) at the same file size as mp3. Therefore, all of my music was ripped at 96kbps wma. And downloaded music was converted down(when ripped at a higher bitrate) to that format as well.

I'm sure that many people cringed when reading that, but through some tests I found that I could not discern the difference in 95% of my music between 192k mp3 CBR and my 96k wma. I liked having the extra hard drive space in exchange for perfect sound quality. I never really had any regrets until now.

I am trying to switch to Ubuntu 100% but that can be difficult with wmas. I currently have it working fine but tagging programs can be difficult and many media players (mainly mpd) are not compatible with wma and plugins are often unstable. So I want to make a switch to another format probably mp3. I understand that mp3 is still a proprietary codec but unfortunately, it seems to be the most compatible with software and hardware.

So, how should I convert them and to what bitrate? I was thinking 192k mp3 VBR. That seems to be similar to the quality of my music and offer a good balance of quality and file size. And I was probably going to use DB PowerAmp but am open to any suggestions (hopefully F/OSS) of Windows or Linux software. I currently have about 7500 songs using about 13.6 GB but I will probably clean that up to around 6000 songs. Also, will I lose any quality in the conversion process?

Any help is greatly appreciated. Let me know if any more information is needed. Thanks in advance.

posted by coolin86 to computers & internet (8 comments total)

You might lose some quality in the conversion, sure; with any conversion from one lossy form form to another you risk doing so (says the guy who recodes everything as AAC).

My bigger question is this: What makes you think you can take a 96kbps track and convert it to a 192kbps track? You can't blow up a tiny image and have it look good. Once that data is gone, it's gone.

My suggestion is to re-rip (painful, I know) anything you still have on CD to the format and bitrate you wish to use. For everything else, well, convert it, but don't change the bitrate; you may end up with larger files but you won't end up with better quality files, so it's essentially a waste of disk space.
posted by caution live frogs at 7:33 AM on July 13, 2007

I'd recommend re-ripping your CDs to FLAC (maybe on an external drive), and then converting those to mp3. More disk space, yes, but then you'll never have to face ripping from CD again -- no matter what the format of the moment is, you can convert to it with just CPU cycles without the manual labor of swapping CD's in and out.

Like caution live frogs says, converting from one lossy format to another, things can only get worse -- they can't get better.
posted by Zed_Lopez at 7:42 AM on July 13, 2007

@caution:
I forgot to mention it above but I will probably re-rip the CDs if thats what people seem to suggest. I'm willing the make the commitment if the end result is worth the time.

Also, my feeling on the higher bitrate for conversion is this. WMA is a better algorithm for determining what data to drop. Therefore converting to a higher MP3 bitrate will keep me from losing any more data. I understand that it won't make the file sound better but I just want to make sure that I don't make it any worse. Does that make sense? My logic/knowledge may be flawed. Thanks.
posted by coolin86 at 7:45 AM on July 13, 2007

I'm afraid your logic is slightly flawed, coolin. To oversimplify, whether or not WMA is "better" at deciding what data to drop, it's certainly different. Transcoding to MP3 will take the stripped-down WMA, decode it to something playable (minus the data WMA decided to drop), and then encode it back to MP3 (minus still more, different data that the MP3 algorithm decides to drop). (Yes, I know, that's not really true for an efficient encoder, but it's notionally true.) In any event the data that WMA stripped out is lost, and MP3 will strip out other data, so the copy will be even worse. Perhaps not worse in a way you can hear, so it may not be the end of the world, but you want to avoid this in the future and hard drives are cheap, so I would recommend (as everyone else does) re-ripping to FLAC or something else lossless. Those formats can very quickly be converted to whatever you need for your player of choice, or even played directly through the computer under Ubuntu.

By the way it sounds like we're talking about 500-600 CDs or so. That's going to take a long time to rip to FLAC. If you have the means, you might think about using a ripping service. (See various AskMes for which one.)
posted by The Bellman at 8:04 AM on July 13, 2007

Thirding or fourthing or whatever-ing FLAC. Then ripping to mp3 or whatever from the FLAC, but using FLAC on the outset ensures that you don't have to worry about reripping actual CDs.

Burn your FLACs onto DVD perhaps?
posted by the dief at 8:31 AM on July 13, 2007

Hydrogenaudio is the defacto standard forum for questions like this. There are quite a lot about transcoding lossy -> lossy, including blind tests people have done.

The general consensus that, yes, you shouldn't, especially not when starting out with a painfully low bitrate, and not with a nasty codec like WMA as your starting point (how you can't find it hideous I don't know, cheapy "multimedia" speakers or something?)

+1 on ripping to FLAC, though WavPack is a good alternative too if you need a few extra percent compression and don't mind slightly less hardware/software support.
posted by Freaky at 9:05 AM on July 13, 2007

I wouldnt rerip them. Ever. Theyre going to sound terrible and youre going to wish you kept the original WMAs. There has to be a usable player for linux. Maybe you can make some kind of financial donation/bounty on the condition the developers fix whatever bug bothers you most.

In the meantime I'd rerip all your old CDs and redownload whatever you can. Re-encode as a last resort.

Have you tried xine?
posted by damn dirty ape at 12:49 PM on July 13, 2007

@ape:
There are some players that work fine (currently I am using exaile) but I would like to have more flexibility and options. Tagging the files is often difficult.

@everyone:
It looks like re-ripping is the only option. I figured that would be the resonse but was staying optimistic about another alternative. I am currently on the lookout for a new external HD to store my FLACs. I chose a few best answers but they were all helpful. Thanks for all the help.
posted by coolin86 at 8:10 AM on July 16, 2007