i have a ton of random comedy clips from radio and other stuff... all different bitrates (some are REALLY low... some aren't so bad), frequencies, some mono and some stereo... all in mp3...

basically, what i want, is to just throw all of it in a list and have it all transcoded to some other format without losing any quality, but making the files a lot smaller...


so which codec (i'm guessing ogg vorbis) and how do i just set it up to handle each file appropriately?

First of all you could just leave them as they are and burn it away.

Secund convert them one way or another to the FLAC format q8 via ex. PCM.
Perfect for libraary tasks also for crappy files who you don't wan't to become any crapier with encoding to another lossless codec.

Third you COULD transcode some of them to vorbis q1. Throw them all in the OggDropXP1.6.11-window or do it via commandline encoder but that's not so easy... Remeber that lossy*lossy=very crappy

edit : "lossy*lossy" that is.

"lossy*lossy" that is.

hmmmm.... well the thing is, i'm not trying to burn them... i just want them to waste less of my hard drive space...


if there are higher bitrate files mixed in there, would ogg q1 make them sound like crap?


i mean, its not like the quality is going to be major, because its all just random radio clips of voice or radio shows with minor music... so aslong as they're all clearly audible and not distorted, that'll be fine...

i can easily have them all converted back to .wav before they go to any encoder... so is ogg q1 the way to go? i don't know much about ogg... does ogg have some sort of vbr where it can decide if its encoding crap or reasonable data and not waste space on the crap?

For those clips that are voice-only you may want to check speex 1.0 codec:
http://www.speex.org/

It's open source (part of Xiph.org) and delivers really really low bitrate for good voice quality (much lower bitrate than vorbis for the same quality, but not suitable for music, only speech).

You've got a frontend at RareWares: http://www.inf.ufpr.br/~rja00/

For speech it's the way to go.

Being a fan of roadcycling I tuned an interview of one of my fans in
speex1.0 160 sec at 10428bps VBR - 32kHz - 208kb
vorbis1.0 160 sec at 17460bps VBR - 11kHz - 351kb

Above 16kbps < 44khz I would recommend vorbis
Above 32kbps >= 44 khz " "
http://poorman.port5.com/wevelgem.spx or .ogg

and if you really like the clips BURN them before you crash !