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How do I reduce the bitrate of MP3 files (e.g. to fit more songs into my portable player)?
Well you'd have to convert them to WAV files (Winamp can do this - use the Nullsoft Diskwriter Output plugin, which comes with the standard Winamp install), and then re-encode them using an MP3 encoder (BladeEnc is a free encoder which I've found pretty good). But you will certainly lose some quality.
So far as I know, the only way of converting bitrates is to decode the files and then encode them at the new rate. I assume you're wanting to
encode them at a lower rate in order to make them smaller. (There's absolutely no point encoding them at a higher rate, since it won't improve the quality at all, and it will simply make the files bigger.) There may be a utility to do this in batches, but I don't know of one. However, you can easily do each of the two stages in batches, so long as you have enough hard disk space:
1) Use Winamp to create WAV files. Under preferences (Ctrl-P) select as Output the Nullsoft Diskwriter plugin, and press the Configure button to choose the directory for your WAV files - must be on a disk with plenty of space. Then put all the files you want to convert on a playlist and press play - Winamp will convert them all to WAV files in the chosen directory (so long as there's enough space - about 10 MB per minute of audio).
2) Use BladeEnc (or your encoder of choice) to re-encode the files. BladeEnc is free, and you can find it at ZDNet (www.hotfiles.com). To encode all your WAV files at 64 Kbps, for example, from a command line just enter:
bladeenc -64 c:\wavs\*.wav
- obviously using whatever directory you actually put the WAV files into. BladeEnc will convert them and put the resulting MP3 files into the same directory as the WAV files. MP3 files at 64 Kbps will take around .5 Mb per minute of audio. Warning - this will take a long time... plan to set it going when you are going to bed or going out and let it chug away in your absence. And don't forget to disable your screen saver, since many screen savers take such a chunk of the computer's resources that they'll slow BladeEnc right down once the saver kicks in.
