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I have thousands of music tracks in WMA format from when I used to use Windows Media Player to rip CDs. Now I'm having problems playing them on my Linux desktop at work.

Is there a good solution (for Windows or Linux) for converting all the WMAs to MP3s while leaving them in the same directories as before? I tried using iTunes to do it, but it started creating new directories to store all the converted tracks, which I don't want.

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In Linux (what distro, by the way?) some combination of find -execdir and ffmpeg should do it, but I will run some test before I post an answer. – William Jackson Jun 19 '11 at 19:27
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Be aware that any time you convert between lossy formats, you lose quality. Whether that loss in quality is audible depends on the original quality, the the encoder you're using for the transcode, your playback equipment, and your ears. If it were me, I would look at re-ripping the CDs (if possible) rather than transcoding. Even though I know that takes a lot more time. You might also consider storing your ripped CDs in a lossless format (FLAC is my favorite, but there are others), and transcoding that to MP3 for your portable MP3 player, etc. That of course requires more disk space. – Flimzy Jun 19 '11 at 21:38
@William: At work I use openSUSE, at home I use linux mint (ubuntu) and windows 7. I'll have to check out ffmpeg when I have time and see if I can write a bash script or something. If you post an answer that works then I'll mark that – Eddy Jul 1 '11 at 11:47
@Flimzy: I'll try converting a few tracks and check by ear whether I notice the loss in quality. I'm not an audiophile so I suspect it will probably be ok for me, but better safe than sorry I suppose – Eddy Jul 1 '11 at 11:49
I use DB PowerAmp Music Converter for this, awesome software but not free (mp3 license required)...dbpoweramp.com/dmc.htm – Moab Jul 5 '11 at 12:49
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4 Answers

up vote 2 down vote

If you have thousands of files, then this will take forever.

find . -iname "*.wma" -execdir ffmpeg -i {} -ab 192k -map_meta_data 0:0 {}.mp3 \;

I tested this on Ubuntu 11.04. If you haven't already, you need to install the packages ffmpeg and libavcodec-extra-52.

Start this command from the parent directory that contains all your WMA files. It will search through all subdirectories for any file with a .wma extension and attempt to convert it to MP3. If the source file is named Awesome Song.wma, the new file will be Awesome Song.wma.mp3 and will be in the same directory as the source file.

If you normally user a bitrate higher or lower than 192k, change the -ab 192k flag to whatever you want.

Newer versions of ffmpeg may have replaced -map_meta_data with -map_metadata.

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up vote 1 down vote

This added flag will tell ffmpeg to try and preserve the ID3 tags:

find . -iname "*.wma" -execdir ffmpeg -i {} -ab 192k **-map_metadata 0:0** {}.mp3 \;
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up vote 0 down vote

I've never tried this software but it looks promising and it's free.

http://www.freemp3wmaconverter.com/

WMA to MP3 tutorial.

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up vote 0 down vote

Free Mp3 Wma Converter 1.95 will definitely get your job done.

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