I'm thinking of getting a portable 256mb sized player(not sure which one).
Most of the files on my empeg are encoded at lame alt preset standard.
To save space on the portable i'd like to convert them to a smaller file.Is this possable or do I need to just encode the originals themselves to a smaller file?

Re-encoding your mp3s will result in poorer quality. I'd recommend you rip them from the original wave files if you have them. If you don't then you'll have to convert the mp3s to wave files and re-encode. It probably won't matter too much to be honest as portable devices aren't usually used for audiophillic purposes - unless your a die-hard member of this bbs

I'm sure you can do this, but you have to consider that re-encoding an already lossy encoded file to an even lower bitrate is going to result in a much lower quality file than re-encoding the original .wav. (or flac - basically lossless) file to that lower bitrate.

Edit. Philip beat me to it

Is this how most people put files on their portables or do they just use the same sized file and not worry about size.

If I decode back to wav, will the resulting wav be the same as the original?

No, the wav file will be degraded compared to the original.

Looks like I may have to just get a larger capacity player and not worry about size.

I have a really old version of Music Match and I use it to batch convert mp3s from VBR to 96kps. It's doing the same thing as other programs: convert to wav, convert back to lower quality mp3. But it will a bunch at once, works pretty fast on a decent CPU and will automatically transfer the tag info.

The version I have is WAY old however. I paid for it and never saw much point in upgrading and paying all over again. So I can't comment on how easy this is to do on the latest release.

As Tony mentioned you can transcode with Lame. Here's the batch file that I use when I want to add songs to my flash player. Change the paths accordingly. You can adjust the parameters to dial in size vs quality. Google for the correct syntax.

for %%f in (*.mp3) do lame.exe -h -V7 --vbr-new -q0 --lowpass 17.5 --athaa-sensitivity 1 --mp3input "N:\Various Artists\Mo Music\X\%%f" "N:\Various Artists\Rio\%%f"