It seems that there is some confusion about audio conversion tools and some people even pay for them.
The truth is that most encoders, even ones you pay for, use ffmpeg internally to do all of the actual work and ffmpeg is free and open source.
You can even get it pre-compiled for Windows, though the version isn’t great.
The only problem with using ffmpeg directly is that it has a command line interface and most novices find it hard to use.
Here’s a batch file for use on Windows which will convert anything you drop onto the file into a 320kbps mp3:
ffmpeg -i %1 -ab 320k -y %1.mp3 @if errorlevel 1 @pause
To create this file, open notepad. Copy and paste the above 2 lines in. Save it as “convert.bat” or something similar (the .bat is important) and select “All files” from the drop down list.
Put the bat file in the same directory as ffmpeg.exe and simply drag anything you want converted on top of the bat file.
You can use almost anything. wav, m4a, m4v, mov, mpg, avi, etc. If you use a file with both audio and video, such as a movie, it will just extract the audio and save that as an mp3 file.
Hi,
Found your bat file most useful this weekend just for doing some quick mp3 work. Wanted to drop the bit rate of some of my files, but needed the meta data to remain. Here’s what I used
ffmpeg -i %1 -ab 160k -map_meta_data %1.mp3:%1 -y %1.mp3
@if errorlevel 1 @pause
Also found using straight ‘ffmpeg’ did not work (not recognized as an internal or external command) so stuck it on my C:Drive and made it C:\ffmpeg
Regards,
C
Thanks for letting me know about
-map_meta_data out:inFor using “ffmpeg” on its own, the executable needs to be on your system path. In Windows this is your %PATH% environment variable. You could put ffmpeg.exe in your C:\Windows\system32 but in this case it is easier to just put ffmpeg in the same directory as your batch file (as the current directory is always checked)