Hi,

I'm looking for a simple mp3/mp2 -> ogg encoder recommendation for windows that
does not require installation and can encode a single file (or folder). The resulting ogg
file should be mono, to get it as small as possible.

I know that normally mp3->ogg conversions are a big No-No due to the loss of quality.

In my usage scenario this is not an issue: I want to convert radio (speech) programs so
that I can get as much as possible on a 2GB Ipod Nano (Rockbox) and don't mind if the
quality suffers a lot. I'll delete the files after listening to them anyway.
I plan to keep the encoder on the Ipod - to run without installation whenever needed.

The conversion has to be directly from mp3/mp2 to ogg - I normally do not have the 2GB
free hard disc space required to unpack the radio shows to WAV before encoding them.

The best thing I have so far is ffmpeg, called like this:
ffmpeg -i input.mp3 -acodec vorbis -aq 20 -ar 22050 output.ogg

Alas it only seems to do ogg in stereo, not mono.

Any recommendations?

You could lame to decode with a pipe, ie.
Note that i made up the parameters for oggenc, cos i've never used it, so find out what options you need to do mono encoding with stdin as the input file (usually done by specifying '-' as the file name), Also I don't know if the -m mono switch works for decoding, but that shouldnt matter if you can get oggenc to do the mono conversion, or if the input mp3 is already mono.

Thank for replying. I'm using this on Windows XP and I don't know if the pipe it working.
Whatever oggenc - parameters I use, I always end up with a 1.mp3.wav file on my harddisc
(for which I do not have the harddisc space in real life)

The lame help also specifies the "--decode" option as
" --decode input=mp3 file, output=wav"

You could try my xcLAME command line program. It will encode wav -> mp3, wav -> ogg, mp3 -> ogg and ogg -> mp3. It's based on LAME3.92 and the 1.0 release of ogg vorbis. I've not kept it fully up to date as there was never great interest in it. I did it for fun, but it does work. Since you say quality is no big issue, this should do the job and it's a bit 'cleaner' than messing with pipes.

You can d/l from: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jfe1205/LAME/xcLAME.zip

You are missing the stdout "-" for LAME's output and -input is not a parameter for oggenc2

Use:
lame --help
and
oggenc2 --help
and reference the options (I'd tell you myself, but I don't remember off the top of my head)

I got it to work - with both mp3 and mp2 source files.

it now looks like this for a 48000 kHz radio file:


The resulting file plays fine on an Ipod Nano with Rockbox.

Thanks. (Also thanks to john33 for the other suggestion)

(Original follow up question removed)

I asked as a follow-up how to do this using ffmpeg.

This is how: