topher

Before you knock me for using mp3 instead of ogg, read all the way through.

A friend had some wma files I wanted, but I wanted them in mp3 format, not wma, so I looked into some windows converters, so that she could do it on her box.  All the good ones where $-ware, and didn’t even seem that cool.  So I went hunting to see what I could find in Linux.

This is what I found.

It’s a very small bash script that uses mplayer and lame to do the conversion.  It can convert from anything that mplayer can play (which is a lot) to anything you care to put into the script.  The default is lame to go to mp3, but you could easily put in oggenc or something.

The flexibility of going from anything mplayer can play to any encoder you care to insert is very very cool.

10 thoughts on “Converting to mp3

  1. Now that I have read all the through, how can you – an open source software advocate – use a proprietary file format? Hmm?

  2. Do not. 😉

    Pine is open source freeware. It’s not as Free as the GPL would like, but I can still have the source and hack it to my heart’s content.

  3. I think jwise meant you – *Topher* – cannot because you cannot program in C.

    Actually, the source code is available but one is prohibited from *distributing* modifications. In other words, if UW decides to quit maintaining Pine and a serious security exploit arises, one is out of luck unless one can program in C adequately. Oh, and no help from your distro’s programmers since they cannot distribute any modifications they may develop.

    Pine is *not* free.

  4. Mr. Wise would be quite correct in stating that I personally cannot hack in C.

    Pine is gratis, Pine is not libre. In fact, Pine is somewhere between the two.

    And jtr only burned me on my blog because I did it to him on his first. 😉

  5. jtr said:
    > one is prohibited from *distributing* modifications.

    Actually, the distribution of “modifications” in the form of .diff files are allowed and encouraged, according to the (somewhat ambiguous) Pine License:
    ” The University of Washington encourages unrestricted distribution of individual patches to the Pine system. ”

    So, I imagine one could distribute the source, along with their patches (assuming they are 133+ enough to H4X0R in C ;-), and everything would be happy.

    This is also SOP with some other software such as qmail MTA. DJB doesn’t want fingers pointing at him when some linux distro patches his sw with the “make_it_trivial_to_crack” patch and distributes it as a binary RPM.
    So, sites such as http://www.qmail-ldap.org/ distribute patches to the (6 year old!) qmail version 1.03.

    -J

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