Convert WMA to OGG ???

[Guy Fraser]

On Fri, 2005-21-01 at 08:57 +0000, Rob Kirkbride wrote:
> Gene Heskett wrote on 21/01/2005 08:28:
> 
> >I made some comparison files from some of my disks, both with a 
> >commercial shareware encoder for making mp3's and with the ogg 
> >method.  To me the obvious winner at any comparable bit rate was ogg, 
> >and at quality level 6, its very very difficult to tell the ogg from 
> >the original, at Q7 there is no discernable difference, and I can 
> >listen to it all night with no fatigue whatsoever. I don't have more 
> >than 20 megs of mp3's in my own collection of about 2.5 gigs. and it 
> >sure beats lugging a 20+ pound cd holder around and getting it 
> >stolen.
> >
> >  
> >
> I'd second that. I've had both a minidisc player which uses WMA? and an 
> MP3 player. I now have an iriver H320 player which uses oggs. To say 
> oggs sound better than MP3s is a understatement. Being a bit of a hi-fi 
> nut I used to laugh at people who thought MP3 bore any relation to the 
> original sound but oggs are massively better than MP3s - (I think i use 
> quality 7 as I recall). MP3s just seemed to remove all the sublties and 
> upset the timing - making them tiresome to listen to as you say (and boring)
> I'm really very happy with my iriver and it works fine with Linux - in 
> fact when I plugged into a windows machine here at work it didn't work 
> cos I didn't have the drivers!
> 
> Native oggs are definitely the way to go!
> 
> Rob
> 
I will defer to those who know about quality.

Roxio CD/DVD creator can do mass conversions from many formats 
to many formats, and I believe it supports ogg. Yeah I know it 
is windows software, but then again where did the wma's come 
from if it wasn't a windows machine? I have used this software 
to rip all of my CDs and some of my cassette tapes.:-)

I saved them as mp3s so they would work wherever I wanted to 
use them. I keep my entire 18GB collection on a small pocket 
sized USB2/IEEE 1394 external drive, and to play an album I 
just drop the folder on XMMS {with xmms-mp3 installed} and it 
plays the whole album.:-)