Hi.
Believing to be able to anticipate the next evolutions of the player I made an error of which I find no exit.

I converted some 1500 songs of my reader in MP3pro 64Kbps.

I know that's stupid.. .But what is even more stupid is that now it is clear (without anticipating) that the player will read soon WMA.
All right... the problem is that I do not succeed in converting my songs MP3pro in WMA .

I have tried Nero, dbpowerAMP Music Converter or Winamp, but nothing works because nothing decodes the MP3PRO before to encode it in WMA.

So does anybody know a way to convert Mp3pro in WMA without losing in quality and without having to repeat operation 1500 times?

I hope someone will be able to "decode"my english first...

So does anybody know a way to convert Mp3pro in WMA without losing in quality and without having to repeat operation 1500 times?

Simply put, no way.

Various lossy compression algorithms (and even the same with different parameters) are going to throw away different info and introduce different artifacts. Your 64kbps MP3PROs are already of marginal quality (even if we accept the claim of quality/bitrate twice as good at that of 'ordinary' MP3 at face value); I suspect that decompressing them to WAVs and compressing again with yield unacceptable result.

After all, try with few tracks. I understand that WinAmp supports MP3PRO. Use its output plugin that writes WAV to disk (if you don't have a more convenient method of producing them), compress WAVs using MS tools and listen carefully, using good headphones. Compare with original. I will be very surprised if you can live with the result

Thank you.

I understand the only thing I have to do is to hope and wait my player to support MP3pro one day...

Because all of the audio compression schemes you describe (MP3, MP3pro, WMA) are lossy, then any conversion from one format to the other will degrade the sound quality.

I have updated the text in my FAQ entry on this subject, check it out.

Your best bet is to re-encode your collection from the original CDs.

I understand the only thing I have to do is to hope and wait my player to support MP3pro one day...

The player will probably NOT support MP3Pro any time soon (maybe never), so the only thing you can do is to re-rip your collection from the original CDs.

I hope the player NEVER supports MP3Pro. And I hope other devices don't either. Send a message to Thompson and Fraunhoffer about MP3Pro: Eet's Crrrap! Not to be confused with PLUS of course.

What we need is people concentrating on higher density devices to store more data and transfer it faster. If someone thinks they need MP3Pro, then they should likely be using some small flash-media device.

It makes much more sense to throw another hard drive into the empeg than to spend time encoding (or RE-encoding) to MP3Pro.

WMA I would like to see, even though I won't use it for my own ripped music.

If you want to put up with lower quality (it probably won't get audibly any worse than it is now), then use TOTAL RECORDER to capture the decoded audio stream while playing the MP3Pro Tracks. Then encode them with a good MP3 encoder like LAME, at a suitable bit rate (it must be higher that whatever you had your Pro files in. Higher than 128 to be safe and if going by Pro's quality claims).

HDs are relatively cheap. If you're serious about long-term MP3 usage and you don't want to re-rip, make archival quality MP3 files from the start. And keep them. At least you then have base files to play with when putting music onto other devices. The greater loss from re-encoding won't be much of an issue on a small portable with headphones for instance.

Bruno

You're right, Total Recorder is a possible solution, but I assumed he didn't want to lose sound quality in the conversion.