It is quite clear why you one would want to convert an audio format to .WAV
or a different format. E.g. If you download some MP3 tracks off the
Internet, you may want to convert them to Wave format to record them onto
CD. Another example would be if you have some OGG audio files and you
want to convert them to MP3 format for use on a portable MP3 player. The
utility I use frequently is Winamp. Although designed for playing Audio,
it can easily batch songs even in various formats and convert them to .WAV.
Read below for more information.
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This prevents annoying junk E-mail internet robots (which send out loan,
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Winamp comes with a .WAV output plugin as standard and can play MP3's as
standard also. It comes with a few other input plugins too. In
order for Winamp to convert an audio file to .WAV, it must have the plugin
to support the format. The simplest way to see if Winamp can support
a particular format is to try playing the track in Winamp. If it doesn't
play, then try getting the plugin off the
Winamp web site. Normally you just type the extension of the file
in Winamp's plugin search box and it will find the plugin. For Real
Audio, you must have at least Real Audio player
basic installed and the Winamp plugin is called
Tara. Please note that some formats cannot be converted to .WAV
with Winamp, e.g. WMA & ASF due to Microsoft's licensing. If you
really need to convert a track to Wave file and you can't find a tool to
convert it, click here for how to do it through the sound card, e.g. useful
for WMA, Liquid Audio, A2B, etc.
Here's a few steps to convert tracks into .WAV using Winamp:
Create a folder on a drive with plenty of free space; normally drive
C. Please allow 10 MB per minute of audio to decode.
Load up Winamp and verify that you can play the tracks you want to convert.
You don't need to do this for MP3's.
If you can't play one or more tracks because Winamp doesn't support
the format, download the plugin (if available) off the
Winamp web site and install them.
Skip to step 5 if converting a single track.
Display the play list box if not already displayed, i.e. click the
[PL] button.
Add files by clicking [ADD] button. If Winamp starts playing,
click the Stop button.
Repeat the above step until you've select all the tracks to convert.
Skip to Step 6
Click the Eject button and select the file to convert. If Winamp
starts playing the track, click Stop.
Right click on the center of the Title bar, i.e. ~=======WINAMP=======_-X
and select Options and click Preferences...
Click Output (Under Plug-ins) on the left box and double click Nullsoft
Disk Writer plugin. Locate the folder which you created and click OK.
Close all the dialogue boxes until you see the Winamp screen again.
Click Play if you have one track to convert or scroll to the top of
the play list and double click the first track if you've a group of tracks
to convert.
Winamp will now convert each track you selected to wave. Note
that during the conversion, you will not hear any audio from the speakers.
Once every track has completed, Repeat steps 5 - 7 but selecting Nullsoft
waveOut Plug-in for step 7, otherwise everything you play will be converted!
Check the folder you created and you should have your Wave audio tracks
there. If any tracks are missing, then those tracks cannot be converted
to .WAV, e.g. Microsoft asked Nullsoft to prohibit the conversion of WMA &
ASF audio to .WAV.
How to convert a track to wave through the sound card:
Note: It's recommended that you try finding a utility off the net to
convert the track into wave format. Some audio players have this built
in, but it may be hidden, e.g. to convert an MP3Pro file to WAV using RCA
mp3PRO player, right click on the player and click 'Write Decoded PCM file...'.
If you have no success, then follow these guidelines for doing it through
the sound card. When playing a track to the sound card and recording
it back off, you will have a slight quality loss or a light backing hiss
in the converted Wave track although this wouldn't be noticeable in low bitrate
tracks, e.g. 64 kbps WMA tracks since they have quite a bit of their own
artifacts throughout the track.
Check to see if you have any audio/wave tools installed on your PC.
If any came with your sound card, try them out. Note that sound
recorder which is supplied with Windows is unsuitable since it only records
60 seconds of audio! Read the instructions or help file which comes
with the utility to learn how to record a 16 bit stereo 44,100 Hz. You
can do some record tests using a microphone attached to the PC or trying
to record a clip off an audio playing CD in the CD-ROM drive. Cowon
Jet-Audio (Ad based freeware) which is available on
download.com would be suitable.
Close down your background applications which use quite a bit of CPU
power or frequently access the hard disk, especially if you use a PC slower
than 200 MHz. If any application hogs the CPU or hard disk while recording,
your audio will skip, i.e. as if it were recorded off skipping record.
Double click the yellow speaker icon in the right task bar; usually
left of the clock.
Click Options, Properties and click click on Recording
check box.
In the bottom box, check every box, e.g. Mic, CD, etc. and click OK.
Now, take not of which controls are muted and unmuted for future reference
(If the tick box beside each control is marked 'Select' then if the 'Select'
tick box is unchecked the control is muted).
Mute every control except the Master control (if available). If
there is a master control, set the volume to Max.
Unmute the Wave control. If your Recording Control box doesn't
have a Wave control, then unmute the Mixed Input.
Set the Wave or Mixed control volume to Max and you should be nearly
ready to start. Don't close the Recording Control box yet. If
the Recording Control box doesn't show a Mixed input or Wave control, then
your sound card may not support Wave recording. Try the next few steps
and if nothing records, then get a double ended stereo 3.5 mm cable (available
in most electrical & music stores) and plug one end in the Speaker socket
and the other end in the Line-in socket. Double click the Speaker icon
again to bring up the volume control, set the main volume to medium and mute
the line-in (to prevent feedback), then close the Box. Afterwards,
adjust the Master volume in the Recording Control box (if available) to medium,
unmute the Line-in control and set it's volume to medium. Note that
you will not hear any audio while using this method.
Start your audio utility recording and start playing the track to convert
immediately.
View the Recording Control and adjust the Wave/Mixed/Line-in Control
so that the sound level rarely reaches the Red and frequently shows one of
the yellow bars.
If you haven't made any adjustments to the Wave/Mixed/Line-in control
since you started the track, then allow the source track to finish playing
and click stop on the other program recording the track immediately, otherwise,
stop the recording and playback, discard the recorded track and go back to
step 10.
Playback the recorded track to verify that it is clip and skip free
(plug the speakers back in if you had removed them). If you have frequent
skipping throughout the recorded track, then try closing all your background
applications. If this still doesn't work, then try setting the recording
application to store its temporary data to a different hard disk (if available)
, a fragmented hard disk can be slow its throughput rate and is enough to
cause skipping. Some sound cards have a variable recording buffer so
have a look at your sound card settings to see if you can adjust one. Then
try re-recording the track, i.e. discard the badly recorded track and go
back to step 10
Save your track; giving it the name of your original track.
Converting Wave audio tracks to a different
format
To convert wave tracks into MP3, I recommend on using an encoder which uses
a LAME or Fraunhafer engine. You can get LAME which runs on a command
line (MS-DOS) from the LAME Web site.
Strangely, LAME stands for Lame Ain't an MP3 Encoder. For other
formats, see their appropriate web sites, e.g. VQF encoders can be found
at www.vqf.com.
Archiving your audio CDs
For archiving your audio collection for backup purposes, I strongly recommend
that you use a high fidelity codec at a higher than usual bitrate. This
is to ensure that you have minimal distortion or artifacts in your archived
audio. OGG would be a good codec to start with as it's designed for
quality at 128k, i.e. a bitrate commonly used with MP3. I find it very
difficult to tell the difference between OGG encoded track at 128 kbps and
the original CD, see my Audio comparison page
for more information. OGG also uses true variable bitrate encoding
to cope with complex parts and can be easily converted back to WAV using Winamp's
plugin, see above for steps.
To extract audio off CDs, you need a CD ripper. Winamp can do the
job using the CD Ripper plugin, see the plugin section on the Winamp web
site for this plugin. Then follow the steps above for converting tracks
to .WAV using Winamp. For step 4.2 or 5, select the source tracks on
your CD. If your CD player auto plays a CD in Winamp by default then
skip steps 4 and 5 and insert the Audio CD instead of performing step 9.
Typically, you can fit 9 full 74 minute audio CD's (around 180 tracks) onto
a single 650 MB data CD if you use 128 kbps. For 160 kbps, you can
fit 7 full 74 minute audio CD's (around 145 tracks) onto a single 650
MB data CD. Keep the backed CD's in a safe place until you need them.
Students (including myself) tend to prefer to keep their original CD's
at home and take their archived CD's to their accommodation, e.g. if your
audio CD-R's get swiped, you still have the original's safe at home. If
you prefer to use the backups frequently, then I would recommend using the
MP3 format and getting yourself an MP3 CD player. MP3 CD players have
gone down in price and cost around the price of around the price of 6 - 8
albums! I.e. You would be worse off losing a standard CD player + 10
albums than losing an MP3 CD player + 2 CD-R MP3 CDs. Also, MP3 CD players
are very useful on long bus journeys, e.g. from your accommodation to home
on weekends or for holidays :-).
