Best Audio Conversion Freeware?

[Tunnelcat]

I see there are several freeware downloads for converting audio files in our freeware listing here. I want to convert a bunch of .WAV files into .MP3 files. Which one does the best job of that?

I've used the Audacity program on my older 98 computer, but I see that the Win 7 version is still beta. Anybody use it recently, or is there something better?

[fliptw]

foobar2000 and lame works

[vision]

Audacity is cool, but you probably want something that works in batch, right? I've used CDexfor years. Love it. Reliable. Easy. Open source too. There is also a very intense program called Super for heavy-duty transcoding jobs.

[Krom]

foobar2000 and lame works

x2, I use this for all my music conversion/mass automated tagging jobs.

[snoopy]

I've use CDex lots, too. I haven't really used it to convert wav -> mp3, but I ripped lots of CD's using it.

If I may, I'd suggest looking into your codec options. I've moved away from MP3. Ogg/Vorbis provides an equivalent to mp3 that's patent unencumbered. I've personally moved to FLAC because it's loss-less. I recently went higher fidelity with my sound setup, and I could hear the difference on my lower-bitrate MP3's. Maybe I'm weird about wanting to be patent unencumbered, but it's worth thinking about.

[Krom]

FLAC is nice but being lossless means it is also big and most portable players don't support it (unless you are lucky like me and your MP3 player supports RockBox firmware).

[Tunnelcat]

Right now, I just want to convert some of my music collection into MP3's so that I can play them on the Independence FM station while I charge around in GTA IV, so a lossy codec doesn't matter. The computer makes noise anyway.

But I would like to have a decent relatively lossless codec for converting my music to use in a future portable music player and for burning CD's to play in my CD player. Right now my CD player is just playing Redbook audio CD's I burned from my HUGE collection of .wav files with Media Center years ago. I'd like to have a nice balance between file size, future proofing and quality for any new format. Suggestions? Like you said Krom, FLAC files are big and not every player supports it.

I'll look into CDex, foobar2000 and lame for my MP3 conversions. Thanks all.

[Krom]

The lossless formats I have in my library are: Monkeys Audio (APE), FLAC, True Audio (TTA) and WavPack.
The compression you can get from lossless is generally 30-50% at best and depends on the source, all of the above codecs perform pretty similarly.
FLAC seems to be the most popular of the lossless formats lately, but I still see the others on rare occasions.

What I generally do is rip to FLAC instead of WAV and just leave that as my archive copy since it will be considerably smaller. Then I convert it to a 160 kbps VBR MP3 when I want it on my portable player which foobar gets done at about 70x playback speed on my aging C2D. The average 50-70 minute disk takes only a minute or so to dump a MP3 copy for portable devices. And with foobar I can just convert it and then shift + drag and drop the files right from the output from foobar into a explorer window on the device. Foobar handles the tagging and file names automatically based on a pattern you can set up.

[fliptw]

if you want to do GTA4, I'd go with AAC rather than lame.you'd need quicktime installed for GTA4 to read them.

I used nero's AAC encoder.

[Tunnelcat]

Just what I needed to know.

[Isaac]

I love the intro theme to that game:

[Tunnelcat]

It is a good sounding music piece. I sat and listened to the whole thing while the game loaded. I normally skip through the intro.