Music file conversion
I recently got myself a new pocket mp3 player. No, this isn't the first time I've owned one. I bought an iPod about 2 and a half years ago and was really happy with it until its harddrive died 3 weeks later. Since then, I've been hesitant about buying a new player. I didn't want to get one of those cheezy 50 dollar players with a 1/4 GB of memory on it. I'd only be able to store like 3 or 4 albums on it without totally rewriting music onto it. I also didn't want to waste $200 on a new iPod or iPod clone.
My dilema was solved, however, when i bought my new Sansa c250. Compared to current mp3 player costs, this player fell on the lower end of the spectrum. At $70, it was quite affordable and didn't break the bank like a new iPod or Zune might. You may be thinking, 'So its a memory stick with earphones, right?', nothing could be farther from the truth! This player has 2GB of memory, a 1.2 inch color LCD, it acts as a voice recorder, mp3 player, FM tuner, and a small picture viewer! On top of that, it has a replaceable battery and a micro SD slot for storage expansion.
All of that said, I was quite pleased with my purchase. My joy quickly came to an end, though, when I tried loading it with music. Most of my library is in .ogg format (an open source, royalty free audio format by Vorbis) which is still relatively new compared to mp3 and not used by many players. Needless to say, my player couldn't play them.
I spent many hours searching for an ogg to mp3 converter to no avail. I then widened my search to find converters I could combine to get the same result (ogg to intermediate format to mp3). I was able to find a cool tool that converted from ogg to wav format, but was unable to get lame or bladeEnc (two wave -> mp3 encoders) to work with the output. I was finally able to get lame to work with the wave output, but had to run it separately each time for each file--Very time consuming.
I was on the verge of writing my own converter to go from wav to mp3 (using the lame encoder api), when I discovered another program that did exactly what I wanted! It let you drag and drop ogg files into a batch processor that outputted mp3s! I have added links to these two programs on the right for anyone who wants them. They were rather hard to find!
My dilema was solved, however, when i bought my new Sansa c250. Compared to current mp3 player costs, this player fell on the lower end of the spectrum. At $70, it was quite affordable and didn't break the bank like a new iPod or Zune might. You may be thinking, 'So its a memory stick with earphones, right?', nothing could be farther from the truth! This player has 2GB of memory, a 1.2 inch color LCD, it acts as a voice recorder, mp3 player, FM tuner, and a small picture viewer! On top of that, it has a replaceable battery and a micro SD slot for storage expansion.
All of that said, I was quite pleased with my purchase. My joy quickly came to an end, though, when I tried loading it with music. Most of my library is in .ogg format (an open source, royalty free audio format by Vorbis) which is still relatively new compared to mp3 and not used by many players. Needless to say, my player couldn't play them.
I spent many hours searching for an ogg to mp3 converter to no avail. I then widened my search to find converters I could combine to get the same result (ogg to intermediate format to mp3). I was able to find a cool tool that converted from ogg to wav format, but was unable to get lame or bladeEnc (two wave -> mp3 encoders) to work with the output. I was finally able to get lame to work with the wave output, but had to run it separately each time for each file--Very time consuming.
I was on the verge of writing my own converter to go from wav to mp3 (using the lame encoder api), when I discovered another program that did exactly what I wanted! It let you drag and drop ogg files into a batch processor that outputted mp3s! I have added links to these two programs on the right for anyone who wants them. They were rather hard to find!
posted by jay at 1:28 PM
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