Okay, I've seen the light. I stupidly chose the wma pro format for my audio library, and now it's proving to be too proprietary and unsupported to be practical.

I realize that converting from one lossy format to another sucks, but I simply don't have the time to re-rip all my CDs in another format.

Is there any reasonable way to convert a wma pro library (including tags) to another more friendly, open source format, preferably OGG or FLAC (would also consider MP3)?

Would REALLY appreciate any help here!

Foobar2000 supports WMA tags in the meantime, meaning you could use it to painlessly transcode your collection to another format of your choice, without losing the metadata. Its converter serves as a GUI for command line encoders, allowing a quick setup and ReplayGain scanning of the resulting data. Tags are automatically transferred between the formats, no need to rely on metaflac.exe, metamp3.exe and consorts.

Lancer is considered being the best available Vorbis encoder. It is based on aoTuV and incorporates fast SSE optimizations. Depending on the quality of your WMA Pro files, you should consider transcoding to high bitrates in order to maintain an enjoyable listening experience. -q6 (~160 kbit/s) should even suffice for low-bitrate input data, -q4 (~128 kbit/s) could be of interest for very high quality sources. Download the SSE optimized oggenc binary and set it up inside foobar's converter in order to start the job.

Of course, FLAC would be the best possible solution, causing no further quality loss. At least if file sizes were of no concern.

On Rarewares you'll find the decent LAME MP3 encoder. I'd recommend going for the latest 3.98 beta with a quality setting of at least -V 2.

Since you consider the patented MP3 as an option, MPEG-4 AAC could be of interest as well. It enjoys decent hardware and software support and has proven being of high quality in the latest listening tests. Nero's command line encoder works with foobar as well, a suggested setting would be one similar to the average bitrate of the Vorbis recommendation, like -q 0.5. Alternatively, high quality sources might also go with -q 0.4.

This is actually a wide variety of possible formats. The choice which one to use is up to you, since no current listening tests with transcoded material are available on this site, at least none which included representative audiences. There's an old transcoding listening test by Guruboolez somewhere, who summarized that MP3 was the worst possible choice for transcoding jobs. But this was the opinion of a single individual, and the codecs he used aren't up-to-date anymore.

Awesome, so basically I can just use Foobar2000 and then choose any output format I want since they're all available as plug-ins? I'll give it a go, thanks so much! Super, super helpful reply!

Not directly as plug-ins. There are a few pre-defined encoders, but these aren't always the latest version ones. Download a binary from one of the sites I linked to, and tell the player to use it instead.

Okay, being totally unfamiliar with Foobar, I don't know what you mean. But I'll install it and give it a go and see if I can figure this stuff out before asking for any more help. It's great to at least have a starting point now!

Thanks for the help, foobar does seem to be able to do what I needed. But I really hate the program as far as a general media player. It's way too complex for mere mortals. So I think I'm going to try to convert my library using foobar, if I can figure that part out okay, and then maybe try to find another program to use going forward as my primary ripper/player/etc.

Thanks again.

Foobar2000 could definitely be called a player aimed to users with advanced knowledge and demands. I simply direct you to the current beta of Winamp 5.5, which looks very impressively to me. Though I run the Amarok player on Linux/KDE most of the time, I still often boot my machine under Windows XP, with Winamp being my preferred jukebox there. I've been using this player for around 6 years now, and I'm still content with it. Properly configuring its many functions and the different plugins can be very time-consuming as well, but in my opinion its ease of use is supreme to foobar's one. But nonetheless, I wouldn't call Winamp a player aimed to the typical beginner, some advanced knowledge about the in-depths of audio and video techniques is needed in order to be able to make full use of its features.

Foobar is only used for file operations by me, mainly transcoding of my FLAC archive to lossy formats and ReplayGain scanning. I've been thinking about making foobar my primary audio player for some time, but the Winamp developers heavily improved their player with the 5.3x branch, causing me to change my mind. The current 5.5 update looks even more promising, hence I linked to this one instead of the current stable version on winamp.com.

Back in the day I rescued some WMA Lossles files thru dbPowerAmp. Works perfectly, and I think it supports WMA Pro.