converting wav to mp3

[Garygary1]

Funny nobody mentioned Audacity

Seriously

I just dump a track into audacity, encode it with the lame plugin and tag it. Super simple.

[SpeshulEd]

I used to record concerts...I was the nerd at music festivals with a 12' mic stand and a bag of pricey audio gear surrounded by a bunch of drunk people...anyway, I used flac for everything back then. When I really got into the hobby, it wasn't uncommon for me to walk into a concert with a few thousand dollars of mics, a preamp and a digital recorder. I used to record at 24/96, talk about big files! As time went on, I switched to 24/44.1, because it was easier to convert the file to 16/44.1 (cd quality) and there wasn't enough of a difference between 96khz and 44.1khz to warrant such large file sizes. You can definitely hear the difference between 24bit and 16bit audio though, its night and day.

I always recorded with enough gain where my levels would barely dance in the red, a little hot, but not too much. The main reason for this was as an archivist, you didn't want any post processing. In order to have a loud recording, you had to run hot.

I would convert a copy of the untouched 24bit file to flac and store it.
I would cut the 24bit file into tracks and convert all of them to 16bit. The 16bit files would be converted to flac and 320 vbr mp3's and shared on the net.

Through all of this, I found dbpoweramp to be the best. It used the LAME encoder for mp3s and could convert to flac as well...could also convert flac to mp3 if you needed it too. The best thing about it was batch conversion. Sound Forge, Audacity, etc all work, but but if you need to convert 30-40 tracks into flac and mp3, it's a pain in the ass to load each one into audacity and convert the file.

As for the audiophile conversation...yeah, a lossless audio file will sound better, but 90% of the time its pointless. That said, I will only buy wav or lossless files, I want to do the mp3 conversion so I know its done properly. I don't trust websites to do it for me.

[Deejaesnafu]

thanks everyone for the input!

[Jester]

itunes is fine for what you want