Hi All,

I have read thorugh the forums for the last hour trying to find an idiots guide to re-encoding a whole collection of mp3's. I have found various threads which do discuss this but I can't find exactly what I need so here goes....

I would like to bring all my mp3's down to 128kbs as I will be going travelling for about a year and want as much music as possible on my iRiver H340. Could someone please explain in idiots terms how I would go about re-encoding all my mp3's in the one hit.

At the moment I have foobar as my music player and I have Lame which I use to rip cd's and understand that I can use both of these together in order to get my files converted.

If someone could please explain how I do this it would really help me out here. I have sometimes been using a programme called mpeg suite to do this which does one album at a time and it is killing me.

Oh almost forgot. I don't have the original cd's with me at the moment so I cannot re-rip them.

The best way would be to use the Diskwriter in Foobar2000. Load all your mp3 files into Foobar, right-click and select "convert", then select what you'd like to convert. If you want to convert to lame 128kbps then you'll need to set up that options in the diskwriter settings.

May I be a bit presumptious ans suggest that instead of mp3 why not try ogg -q4. This will give you files of approx 128kbps, and they play brilliantly on an iRiver.

.dd.

Umm, How do I go about setting up the options in the diskwriter settings? I just had a look and can't see what I'm supposed to change.

That's why i mentioned that I would like an idiots guide because I don't find these things too intuitive and really need it spelled out.

The reason I don't want to use OGG is that it uses a lot of battery. I tried using OGG a couple of weeks ago and my battery only lasted about 75% of the normal time.

perhaps have a trial read at http://www.high-quality.ch.vu
If you browse to the Lossless guides, you will find a basic foobar2000 tutorial, which describes transcoding for the case example Lossless to MPC/Musepack.
Just change the input source from flac to mp3 and the settings for transcoding to mp3, and I hope it helps.

Thanks for all of your help everyone. I just had a look at the tutorial from your link user and it seems to be exactly what I need. I can't do much now as I'm at work but will give it a bash tonight when I get home.

Thankyou

I would use -V 7 if I were. You'd be suprised how well this mode sound despite the low bitrate.

Ogg would also have the added benefit of not "adding mp3 noise to mp3 noise," if you know what I mean. I know there were some tests done that showed that transcoding to different formats yeilded better results than going to the same format, I'm just too tired right now to dig up the threads.

Hi, I've read through quite a bit of the information from the foobar2000 tutorial which is great as it will not only help with transcoding but is also over all very informative.


The first thing I read involving transcoding is this:

1. Start Foobar2000 , which needs the CLI encoder plugin, or this built ver. 0.8 made by Case

http://www.angelfire.com/magic2/hq-audio/t...-2004-03-11.exe

This link no longer leads to the right address. Does anyone know of the new address for this pre built version of foobar? I think I would be much happier if I could get everything I need in the one package rather than download in pieces and then try and stitch them together.

http://www.saunalahti.fi/cse/foobar2000.php

oh, good to know that. I tried it myself, and angelfire tells, it does prevent you from downloading, as certain files might contain virus, lol.
so, one cannot download *.exe files from there.
well, need to redo the download section, and maybe zip even files, which are already compressed

Thanks for the link Synthetic Soul. I have downloaded the foobar special installer and am trying to follow the instructions but when I select all songs, right click and choose convert/settings I am not displayed with CLI Encoder below Diskwriter and it is not an option in the Output format dropdown menu.

I don't understand what is wrong? I then downloaded the CLI plugin from the link and when I tried to instal in the foobar components folder I was told the file already existed.

Any one else care to help?

unfortunately, the "cli"-encoder looks in new foobar versions differently than in my guide.
But in the diskwriter tab, there you should find similar options to configure conversions, and a possibility to save conversion presets, like in "old" cli-encoder.

Universlfront will work for this too.

Mp3 to mp3 abr 128 even sounds terribly artifacted.

If you have the option to use ogg,this sounds much better. Q4 ogg is actually decent for transcoding mp3. ABR 128 mp3 is terrible and obviously artifacted.

I played around trying to fit more on my flash player and could find no option for mp3 to mp3 that was acceptable and I really don't have a keen ear for artifacts.