Hello,

I am trying to build a large archive of ringtones for nextel phones. They need to be 8khz 8bit mono. I would also like to be able to crop them at 30 seconds if possible.

I have a drive of about 240gig of mp3 that I will be converting to wav ringtones. My os is linux (gentoo specifically). I am trying to use lame from command line but just seems like I am going about it wrong. This would be needed just 1 time to convert this giant archive. Can someone tell me if lame is the proper tool to use for this? I havent seen any threads on croping wav files. Also can someone give me some expample syntax to best convert the file to wav...

Thanks!

Sorry to be condescending, but from what you asked you probably aren't
too familiar with the command line.
What I mean is you'll really really really really really really hate this...

OMG! Simple! Just just write a script that takes 2 arguments, infile.mp3 and
out.whatever.format.you.want, then call it w/ find and xargs. Simple!

I had a similar problem (or too much free time) setting up vgetty
(voice modem program) as an interface to play my flac files.
I made a Bourne shell script, which given some options and a
flac/mp3/wave filename makes a rmd (raw modem data) file.

The situation is sorta similar to yours because I needed mono 7200 wave files
to convert to pvf to rmd.

some of the programs I use:

decoding mp3 to mono wave (remove -m to not force mono wave):
madplay -o wave:'outfile.wav' -m 'infile.mp3'
there are plenty of others, but mad is afaik "most accurate"

make wave mono:
sox -t wav 'in.wav' -t wav -c 1 'out.wav'

normalize wave:
ssrc_hp --twopass --normalize 'in.wav' 'out.wav'

make wave X bits:
ssrc_hp --bits 'wave_bits' --twopass 'in.wav' 'out.wav'

resample wave:
sox -p -t wav 'in.wav' -t wav -r 'wave_rate' 'out.wav'
(sox might be faster but might not be as good quality)
ssrc_hp --rate 'wave_rate' --twopass 'in.wav' 'out.wav'

ssrc is "A fast and high quality sampling rate converter"
you probably have to compile it yourself
http://shibatch.sourceforge.net

for cropping wave files and anything else try sox,
"the Swiss Army knife of sound processing tools"
http://sox.sourceforge.net

Sorry this isn't much help, but writing a script is the practical way on unix.
Years ago I used Soundforge ($$$, probably windows only) and I recall it
has a "batch converter" GUI. Maybe one of the Linux GUI audio editors has
similar functionality?

anyways, do you know specifically what format you need?
do you have a program that will take e.g. "8khz 8bit mono" wave files and
output that format?

I know nothing about ringtones and their formats, maybe try something from
http://ringtonetools.mikekohn.net

actually what you gave me is perfect!!

I am writing away....

thank you so much for pointing me to sox... I am used to unix's from a server standpoint but have never used any audio tools. This would be a 1 time conversion on a 250 gig mp3 archive.

The one thing I am stuck on is the croping... searching the net for solutions.