Coder’s Eye

Finding this technique took more time than I thought it should, so I thought I’d share a quick and simple music transcoding tip.

Converting WMA to MP3

1) Get mplayer and lame installed. I use the accelerated and precompiled mplayer and lame for OSX.

2) Create a simple shell script:

#! /bin/sh
set -e
F=$1
mplayer -ao pcm:file="${F%.wma}.wav" "$F"
lame --preset hifi "${F%.wma}.wav" "${F%.wma}.mp3"
rm -f "${F%.wma}.wav"


Save as “convert_wav.sh”, make executable, and run it on your wma files. An easy way to hit all of them in a directory tree is:


find . -name "*wma" -exec convert_wav.sh {} \;


Thanks to the original version, found and modified from that given on Macosxhints.com.

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