Entertainment For Lively Minds
WMA files to iTunes
Posted by billyous on 30 October 2009 - 10:13am.
A friend has sent me a USB stick loaded with Joni and Dylan stuff (ahem... is that legal?) Unfortunately, most the tracks are in WMA format and iTunes doesn't want to know. Can anyone recommend a *free* utility for converting to mp3?
I've tried googling, but all hits are at least 3 years old.
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Try this
http://www.formatoz.com/
Free, and has worked fine for me
Thank you very much
.
Oops
Perhaps I should have mentioned - I'm on a Mac. It appears to be Windows only. Thanks anyway.
WMA is a propriatary, lossy, Windows format
The key word there is lossy. If you convert from WMA to MP3 then you'll be re-encoding a previously compressed file. The resulting audio will be of very low quality.
If you're planning on keeping and listening to the music, the best approach will be to try and get the tracks in a lossless format (FLAC or WAV) then import them into iTunes.
Audacity
should do it for you. Import each file individually from the stick and export as an mp3. Audacity needs an extra plugin Lame_Enc.dll before it will deal with mp3's.
LAME is certainly the best mp3 encoder
but my comments above about re-encoding WMA files to MP3 still apply.
You need to change your friends...
"(ahem...is that legal?)"...almost certainly not. Find someone who doesn't give you dodgy .wma files on a memory stick - QuickTime-based files are much less hassle. You could try Flip4Mac - mainly for .wmv, but claims to deal with 'Windows Media based files', so might work.
Thanks , all
for the help and advice.
Re rip as lossless
If all else fails you can burn them to a CDs and re-rip them. When you do the reripping though you should chose a lossless format otherwise the result will probably sound dreadful. If you don't want to burn to actual CDs you should just be able to make ISO images, mount them and point iTunes at the image.
Even with a lossless re-rip, you'll have ropey sound quality
due to re-encoding the WMA onto CD. You can't put back what's been lost in the compression to WMA and adding an extra two encoding steps (WMA -> CD, WAV -> MP3) isn't going to help
No worse
I don't see why you should lose any "quality" when you go from WMA to CD as the CD is basically the reconstituted WAV of the WMA file. I'm not suggesting that this is going to get you a better sound, merely that it's not going to get any worse, anyway, the worse the sound quality, the more likely the OP is to actually go out (or stay in) and buy the tracks so that the artists get a bit of cash.
You lose the quality when encoding the ripped CD into mp3
1. WMA -> CD is ok, as you say, you'll get a CD of WMA quality
2. Rip the CD to WAV, you'll get a WAV of the WMA quality audio
3. Encode the WAV to MP3, you'll be lossifying the already lossy audio
it's the audio equivalent
of constantly 'blowing up' a photocopy isn't it...
It's worse
No, its worse, because everytime you use a different encoding method, it decides that a little bit more information isn't needed. When you continue to blow up a photocopy you're really only increasing the number of quantisation errors.
That's why...
That's why I said that when you re-rip your WMA sourced CD that you should use a lossless output format.
But the OP wants to get the music into iTunes
My understanding is that doesn't support lossless?
I had to look it up..
I don't think it used to but both OSX and Windows version do now.