I've ripped the majority of my CD collection to WMA lossless. Now I'd like to convert these files to a smaller size that will fit better on portable devices such as a portable media center or mp3 player. I was thinking about converting to a variable bit rate WMA file that encodes at perhaps 192 Kpbs. My Creative Zen Portable Media Center will support WMA or MP3 files.

What would be a great program to make this conversion easy? It's important to me that the ID tags pass thru unchanged from the lossless file to the lossy file. I tried using the free Windows Media Encoder but it doesn't seem to pass the ID tag information automatically. Windows Media Player 10 will actually convert files on the fly (and in the background) during syncing, but I'd rather convert them all in advance. Thanks.

DBpoweramp is one program that will do this.

I believe that Advanced WMA Workshop will do what you want.

Thanks for the two suggestions! I just thought of one more question however.

Do you know if converting directly from WMA lossless to WMA VBR will actually produce the exact same results as going from WMA lossless>WAV>WMA VBR? I chose WMA lossless so I could always exactly recreate the original ripped WAV file. If I skip this step, does the conversion process treat the WMA lossless as if it's fully decoded (and the same as the original WAV) or am I going to introduce some inaccuracy by resampling a losslessly compressed file directly?

Both ways are the same. Either way it still creates the wav, just if you go direct it never writes it to the disk to save time.

Using foobar, you can do a sample by sample check of two audio files when converting between formats. Its handy if you want to be sure.