MP3 management - converting bit rates on the fly - is it possible?

[Brian Schwarz]

Is there a Linux program that can convert the bit rate of MP3s on the fly? I
don't want to double up my MP3 collection with 2 versions of every song,
but I want 128 kbps for playing through my stereo and something less for
playing in my portable player.

Any suggestions for software to do this? Unfortunately, when I search
for "mp3 bitrate convert" and similar search terms on google, I come up
with lots of links about converting from wav to mp3 and nothing to
address this particular challenge. My jamp3 player (a cheap little $30
MP3 player with 16 megs of RAM) came with a Windows program that could do
this, but it requires Win9x (won't even work under Win2k for some
reason).

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Brian

--
______________________________________
The opinions expressed here are my own,
and do not reflect those of my
employers - past, present, or future.

[KJ]

On Tue, 23 Oct 2001 05:19:03 GMT, "Brian Schwarz"
<brian@_nospam_-_bluecollartech.com> wrote:

>Is there a Linux program that can convert the bit rate of MP3s on the fly? I
>don't want to double up my MP3 collection with 2 versions of every song,
>but I want 128 kbps for playing through my stereo and something less for
>playing in my portable player.
>

Lame 3.89beta should be able to do this. I had to do this once for
some of my mp3's. converting 128kbps to 64kbps. I think I used lame.
If it does do direct mp3 to mp3 conversion ,it shouldn't be too hard
to write script that decoded the mp3 file with mpg123 then pipe it
back to lame to encode it.

something like:

for i in `ls *.mp3`; do mpg123 $i -w $i.wav | lame -options
newfile.mp3; done.

Or something like that. :)

[Brian Schwarz]

Interesting. I'll give it a try. Of course, to really make this smooth, I
should try to set this up as a web page that lists all of the MP3s with
options to download them at various bit rates, and then use some kind of CGI
script to convert them on the fly. I should probable do some hunting to
see if somebody has this as a canned solution before I try to do it myself.

Thanks for the suggestion,

Brian

"KJ" <non...@home.com> wrote in message
news:jr5att8742iibsl7h...@4ax.com...

> On Tue, 23 Oct 2001 05:19:03 GMT, "Brian Schwarz"

> Lame 3.89beta should be able to do this.

[Brian Schwarz]

This would be a nice feature to fold into some kind of GUI portable MP3
player management console. Guess it's time for me to learn how to build a
GUI!

Thanks again for the suggestion,

Brian

--

____________________________
The opinions expressed here are my
own, and do not reflect those of my
employers - past, present, or future.

____________________________

"KJ" <non...@home.com> wrote in message
news:jr5att8742iibsl7h...@4ax.com...