Audio Conversion Recommendations?

Off-Topic
1

Looking for recommendations for a good audio conversion toolkit.

WinXP or Linux.

Need to support MP3 out @ 128.

Various high bit rate MP3 (160, 192, 256, 256 VBR, 320), WMA, and MPC files.

Batch conversion preferred, but point and click by directory fine.

Audio Quality is more important than conversion speed.

Two stage, Source -> WAV -> Target ok as long as process is automated and the intermediate WAV files are cleaned up immediately.

Freeware or full function shareware / trialware. Free/Donate ware preferred.

2

Why would you want to do something like that? Transcoding is always a bad idea because not only you lose quality because of the (possibly) decreased bitrate, but you also introduce additional quantization noise to the files.

Anyways, GX::Transcoder is a nice software that is dedicated to encoding and decoding.
Personally, I use the audio palyer foobar2000 that also comes with a converter that is able to encode to any format, as long as you have a command line encoder for the desired format (e.g. LAME.EXE for MP3).

3

Yep. I understand the audio issues, but, I have limited storage space and format support on my MP3 portable player. I want to create copies of specific tracks for download to the player.

Thanks. I will take a look at these tools.

4

If you want to try foobar2000, I'd install the latest foobar2000 0.9 RC.

5

Thanks to both of you for the recommendations.

I have made foobar2000 my default MP3, MPC and M3U player (once I wrestled automatic file re-associations away from MMJB). Very nice. Particularly appreciate the very wide coverage of file types and the tabbed playlists. Almost zero learning curve.

I have used GX::Transcoder to convert MPC to MP3 and tested it with some other transcoding. Took a bit to figure out the interface, but, once I had that done worked a charm.