WMA to MP3 Converter?

[bphillip]

Does anyone know of a good program to convert WMA's to MP3's? (Free would be great:;)
Thanks...bp

[Krell]

http://www.wma-mp3.com/

http://www.audioutilities.com/

[Jared592]

Not to kill anything you plan on doing, but WMA and MP3 are similar in that they both compress the audio but different in the algorythms they use to do it. You're making one format lossier by converting and compressing in another format. If you have the original CD it's better to re-rip, or, if you have a high speed connection, re-download in the format you want.

[Krell]

but . .but . .but Jared592 . . that would make SENSE

No one wants to hear that dribble

Can you recommend at least 5 new apps that he will need to?

j/k

[grab_grab_the_haddock]

Originally posted by Krell
but . .but . .but Jared592 . . that would make SENSE

No one wants to hear that dribble

Can you recommend at least 5 new apps that he will need to?

j/k

ROTF.....

Jared is absolutely right, the more times you compress an audio file the more sound quality you lose, much better just to compress once then leave well alone.

sure it would be nice to have all your media in the same format especially since mp3 is a more widely supported, but ive never found any reason to go changing between compressed formats. ive got stuff on my hard drive in mp3, mp3 pro, .wma .ogg and .ape and never had any problems at all. any decent player supports all these formats. If you wanna burn it just convert to wav and burn the wav.

If you feel you absolutely HAVE to convert one lossy codec to another dBpoweramp is by far the best solution i have seen.

download it for free at www.dbpoweramp.com
you will also need to download the wma codec from the same site as (i think) it doesnt come pre-installed.

[Tremaine]

go to dbpoweramp from the link above get the window media codec and mp3 codec and should be fine simple program and gets the job done.

[overdo]

dbpoweramp is also available in the ZP tools section here (http://www.zeropaid.com/dbpoweramp/)

[bphillip]

I'll probably just leave them the way they are, I didn't know you lose quality by changing the format.
I was just going thru my shared music and noticed that I had about 12 songs that were wma's, just thought they'd be better off as mp3's to anyone that downloaded them.

[SKIcascades]

Not only do you lose quality each time you change formats, but once you do down from a lossless file (meaning: no loss in original audio quality) to a lossey file (meaning: you lose some of the full spectrum of bandwidth in order to gain the smaller file size), you can never go back.

Once you've lost that range of full audio file, you've lost it forever. I learned this the hard way, when I tried converting an MP3 file back to .cda, so it would play on the CD player in my sister's car. Nope. Didn't work. It can't. Be sure to keep a full backup of anything you plan to convert, because the only way to recover it is, most likely, to buy the CD again... and that defeats part of the goal with this whole file-sharing game.