I need a program that will do what iTunes does but isn't iTunes as far as compressing my music library to a bitrate I can choose. Anything out there recommended? I'd have to have to use iTunes for this it's messy as all hell.
The big problem with that is that's called transcoding, and since you're going from lossy MP3's to lossy MP3's, you'll suffer generation loss in addition to the quality loss due to a lower compression. Think of taking a document you received by fax, then faxing it back, or photocopying a photocopy, a few generations usually results in a garbled mess.
And I'm not sure how much space you would save unless you are willing to really sacrifice quality (i.e. if they are spoken word, you could probably cut it by 1/10th from a high bitrate down to 64kbps or something, convert to mono too).
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The big problem with that is that's called transcoding, and since you're going from lossy MP3's to lossy MP3's, you'll suffer generation loss in addition to the quality loss due to a lower compression. Think of taking a document you received by fax, then faxing it back, or photocopying a photocopy, a few generations usually results in a garbled mess.
And I'm not sure how much space you would save unless you are willing to really sacrifice quality (i.e. if they are spoken word, you could probably cut it by 1/10th from a high bitrate down to 64kbps or something, convert to mono too).
Well what I was doing with itunes was going from 320 to 192. And I couldn't tell the difference at all. I even put on a pair of fancy headphones and tried to tell the difference but I couldn't, and the savings was about 7 MB's. On a 16 or 32 MB device that's huge.
I use foobar2000 as a front end when I want to create MP3s from FLAC (it also uses LAME - foobar simply provides an interface), but there are a huge number of settings so there may be an option to transcode.
Open source so you may want to take a look.
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Well what I was doing with itunes was going from 320 to 192. And I couldn't tell the difference at all. I even put on a pair of fancy headphones and tried to tell the difference but I couldn't, and the savings was about 7 MB's. On a 16 or 32 MB device that's huge.
The ability to downsample on the fly while transferring to a device is one of the big things I miss from iTunes/iOS that I've never found an Android equivalent for.
As for recommendations, I usually just use iTunes, but for stuff that iTunes can't handle or for larger jobs I've used MediaHuman before and it seemed fine:
Music compression application
