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View Full Version : So sad - wma encoding question


Joe999
16th February 2004, 04:08
I feel a little dirty asking this, but I was wondering if anyone had any ideas of how to encode wma in Linux. I recently bought an mp3 player, and it also has wma support. Idealy I'd like to download talk radio rm streams, and convert them to wma for later listening on the hardware player. I know there's going to be significant loss of quality from compressing an allready very lossy file into an equally low bitrate, but as long as I can make out what the people are saying it's not that big of a deal. It's a little galling that vorbis would have been a good solution and I can't use it, but money issues meant I had to go for the cheapest unit I could buy.

So, any ideas on how to convert a wav to wma in Linux? Right now I'm using Dbpoweramp through wine, but there's a significant delay with it before it starts encoding for some reason - something like five minutes of waiting before the program will start the encode. Native would be best, or at least as native as would be possible when using MS's codecs. But I'd happily settle for any suggestions of programs which have proven to work well under wine for people.

ferocious
21st February 2004, 15:03
why not using another format like mp3 or ogg ?

Joe999
23rd February 2004, 04:29
Originally posted by ferocious
why not using another format like mp3 or ogg ?

I'd really, really prefer to use ogg - especially since I've already ripped all my cds to it. Sadly though, no support for it on my mp3 player (portable hardware one, not software). And even more sadly, I havn't found mp3 to be very good for very low bitrate encodes - which are perfect for fitting as much as I can onto the player.

bond
23rd February 2004, 11:15
wma9 is also not good at low bitrates, but yes it is still better than mp3 in this bitraterange