How to convert .wma to .mp3 ?

[M Daniel R M]

> Arthur Pemberton wrote:
> 
> > From my WIndows days I converted alot of my music to wma as it was 
> > smaller and my mp3 player supported. OSS applications seem not to 
> > fully support wma (for obvious reasons) most troublingly the wma meta 
> > data. So I would like to convert select directories of wma to mp3. I 
> > have mplayer playing my wmas perfectly.
> >
> > Please advise.
> > Thank you.
> >
> WMA and MP3 are both lossy formats. converting from one to another tends 
> to distort the quality of the music. If you want to do it the right way, 
> record your music it in FLAC format (lossless open source format )  or  
> Ogg Vorbis - Lossy, better than MP3, open source format and it will play 
> out of the box in Fedora
> 
> regards
> Rahul
> 

I'd rather either first look for this into the list-archives of mailing
list such as: mencoder-users, transcode-users, mjpeg-users, ffmpeg-user,
etc...or would ask there directly. Though, please keep in mind that
those tools are mainly intended to video-audio edition & processing, so
formats such as wma are absolutely marginals, since it is useless in
this area generally. 

Man pages of THESE and other related tools -such as sox or lame- are
interesting too, and it worth to have a look into them (remember it in
the future if you plan further media experiments ;-),  because they come
plenty of explanatory examples, but I doubt they even mention that
format (you can try it with its man and a pipe to grep...). 

The MPlayer documentation worthwhile as well:
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/index.html

A more specific link would be:
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/menc-feat-dvd-mpeg4.html#menc-feat-
dvd-mpeg4-audio
If, as you said, mplayer can play that sound, you can adapt the second
command line as your taste in order to obtain first a wav file that then
would be converted into what you want...From this point, once you've had
a .wav file, possibilities as a tools for conversion are lot of them;
for example, into the third line of commands of that page it is shown
how to use oggenc easily (man oggenc...)

Finally,
http://bulma.net/body.phtml?nIdNoticia=1744
 here there are two scripts (#comments are in Spanish) to automate the
process (either to mp3 or to ogg audio), also renaming files, etc...It
uses mplayer to convert .wma to .wav with the "-ao pcm" option (audio
output PCM), and then, for .mp3 conversion the lame tool can be used,
and for .ogg the oggenc will do it. It worth to have a look to
understand, although I've never had to run it...I no have .wma
files! :-) 

Cheers,

Daniel Rodríguez