I just ripped tons of music to my comp then i tried to convert to mp3 so i can fit more songs on cdrs for my cd player only to find that they' re " protected" and that i cant convert then legally which is retarded because im not going to file share then so does anybody know a better way to convert than reripping them all over again?

Where did you ' rip' the music From?

Get a Mac. They won' t give you such a pain. They " rip" straight to AIFF (equivalent to uncompressed WAV files) just by dragging the track off of the CD to the desktop. Then the AIFF can be encoded to MP3 with iTunez. In fact I think iTuNeZ may even be able to encode straight to mp3 from the CD. The only " gotcha" is that no legal copying is allowed. It only performs illegal copying and that' s it.

Try iTunes for Windows and " rip" straight from the CD. Warning: iTunes won' t encode any crappy music, so if you like rap you' ll be out of luck. You may want to try a different encoder if you want to encode crappy music.

I would also actually like to know a good answer to this that does a) not involve using a goddamn mac and b) doesn' t involve booting up high-end edit/encoding software which i prefer to save for kikizo video coverage only. ;-) How darn hard can it be to do wma > mp3 with a simple piece of software!?

The problem for me is that a load of music files i have ripped from cds (that I have bough thank you very much) are only able to be ripped to wma iirc. But my PSP only plays MP3. So you see the problem here. :)

For ripping audio CDs directly into MP3s I use CD DA Extractor..

http://www.poikosoft.com/download.aspx


I downloaded some songs from the Real Player Shop unfortunately they were in a protected format that wouldn' t transfer to my NetMD so all I did was burn the downloaded songs onto an audio CD and then ripped the songs on the CD directly into MP3s using the program above.


Protected format vs. Terry Bogard = I WIN!!!

I have a question:

Why are you encoding them to WMA in the first place? Just leave them as WAV' s. Problem solved.

Because as far as I know, WAV' s take up a hullova lot more space.

It' s only slightly above 10 megabytes per minute. And if you don' t have enough hard drive space to hold a full CD' s worth of audio (about 750 megs or less) then there are problems afoot. WAVs can be encoded into MP3 much easier.

That' s why I' m saying that the solution is painfully obvious. Don' t encode to WMA. Just copy the WAV files. Encode the WAV files into MP3s using LAME. Delete the WAV files. I cannot think of any reason to do it any other way, other than encoding directly from the CD.

Don' t forget to provide them with a link to the MP3 Club :)

Other than to place on an MP3 player, why would you want to convert from .wma to MP3?

The .wma files are half the size of their MP3 counterparts...correct me, if I am wrong here.