Converting Windows Media Audio files into MP3 format is rather easy with mplayer and lame. My car stereo plays MP3s, so WMA is of no use to me!
This code is based on this script but I have to wonder why they overwrote the wma file?
Piping the output of mplayer into lame is left as an easy lesson for the reader!
for i in *.wma ; do mplayer -vo null -vc dummy -af resample=44100 -ao pcm -waveheader "$i" && lame -m j -h --vbr-new -b 160 audiodump.wav -o "`basename "$i" .wma`.mp3"; done; rm -f audiodump.wav
Thanks. I recently found a similar technique for m4 files. In case you don’t want the big temporary file, you can use a fifo. Here’s my script:
#!/bin/bash
#
# Dump wma to mp3
for i in *.wma
do
if [ -f $i ]; then
rm -f “$i.wav”
mkfifo “$i.wav”
mplayer -vo null -vc dummy -af resample=44100 -ao pcm -waveheader “$i” -aofile “$i.wav” &
dest=`echo “$i”|sed -e ‘s/wma$/mp3/’`
lame -h -b 192 “$i.wav” “$dest”
rm -f “$i.wav”
fi
done
I would just like to thank the above(/below?) person for replying with his method of converting WMA’s to MP3’s.
It helped me. π
The latest version of mplayer complains about -ao pcm -waveheader – actually, it just needs to be replaced with -ao pcm:waveheader, and everything works again. Btw, thanks for the instruction, it is both useful and educational π
Nice tip. – gotta love linux for it’s flexibility. π
and did anyone bother to make it to choose appropriate bit rate and mono/stereo depending on what was in the original wma??
Thanks, nice tip
For latest versions of mplayer (on Fedora Core 4), you will need the following instead:
for i in *.wma
do
filename=`basename "$i" .wma`
#Rip with Mplayer / encode with LAME
echo "Ripping $i"
mplayer -quiet -vo null -vc dummy -af volume=0,resample=44100:0:1 -ao pcm:waveheader "$i"
echo "Encoding $i to "$filename".mp3"
lame -quiet -m s audiodump.wav -o "$filename".mp3
rm audiodump.wav
done
On SuSE 9.3, (MPlayer 1.0-pre7) got it working (with the FIFO) sweetly with
#!/bin/bash
#
# Dump wma to mp3
for i in *.wma
do
if [ -f "$i" ]; then
rm -f "$i.wav"
mkfifo "$i.wav"
mplayer -quiet -vo null -vc dummy -af volume=0,resample=44100:0:1 -ao pcm:waveheader:file="$i.wav" "$i" &
dest=`echo "$i"|sed -e 's/wma$/mp3/'`
lame -V0 -h -b 160 --vbr-new "$i.wav" "$dest"
rm -f "$i.wav"
fi
done
I like hq VBR, but you can change the lame settings as you like. Note the MPlayer settings have changed.
I recentlt download a media file with a m4. extension and found that I could’nt open it udwer Windows XP . How do I eliviate this problem ? . If ou have any solutions please email me .
nice
Hey, *really* use the power of Unix and skip creating the intermediate .wav file by piping mplayer output to a fifo, and having lame read that as its stdin!
e.g:
if [[ -e ./pcm_audio ]]
then
else
mkfifo ./pcm_audio
fi
function wmatomp3 {
lame \
–tt “$title” \
–ty “$year” \
–ta “$artist” \
–tc “$comment” \
–tg “$genre” \
–tl “$album” \
–quiet -h – “$mp3file”
Let’s try that again:
Hey, *really* use the power of Unix and skip creating the intermediate .wav file by piping mplayer output to a fifo, and having lame read that as its stdin!
e.g:
if [[ -e ./pcm_audio ]]
then
else
mkfifo ./pcm_audio
fi
function wmatomp3 {
lame \
--tt "$title" \
--ty "$year" \
--ta "$artist" \
--tc "$comment" \
--tg "$genre" \
--tl "$album" \
--quiet -h - "$mp3file"
OK, one more time, just the function:
function wmatomp3 {
lame \
--tt "$title" \
--ty "$year" \
--ta "$artist" \
--tc "$comment" \
--tg "$genre" \
--tl "$album" \
--quiet -h - "$mp3file"
function wmatomp3 {
lame \
--tt "$title" \
--ty "$year" \
--ta "$artist" \
--tc "$comment" \
--tg "$genre" \
--tl "$album" \
--quiet -h - "$mp3file"
ok. it doesn’t like ampersands.
following the “$mp3file” should be:
[ampersand]
mplayer -quiet -af resample=44100 -ao pcm:waveheader -ao pcm:file=pcm_audio -vc dummy -vo null -playlist $url
}
here is what I have done:
remove_spaces=1
tmp_file="pcm_audio"
function rm_spaces() {
mv "$1" `echo $1 | tr ' ' '_'`
}
function tomp3() {
ext=$1
for i in *.$ext
do
if [ -f "$i" ]; then
dest=`basename "$i" .$ext`
if [ "$ext" = "ogg" ]; then
echo "Encoding $i to "$dest".mp3"
transcode -q 0 -i "$i" -o "$dest" -y null,lame 2>/dev/null
else
rm -f "$tmp_file"
mkfifo "$tmp_file"
#echo "Ripping $i"
mplayer -quiet -vo null -vc dummy -af volume=0,resample=44100:0:1 -ao pcm:waveheader:file="$tmp_file" "$i" &>/dev/null &
echo "Encoding $i to "$dest".mp3"
lame --quiet -m s -h -b 192 -V0 --vbr-new "$tmp_file" "$dest".mp3
# remove temp file
rm -f "$tmp_file"
fi
# remove spaces
if [ $remove_spaces = 1 ]; then
rm_spaces "$dest".mp3
fi
fi
done
echo "done."
}
case "$1" in
ogg)
tomp3 ogg
;;
wma)
tomp3 wma
;;
*)
echo "Usage: tomp3.sh wma|ogg"
exit 1
esac
exit 0
Thanks. I had to burn Audio CDs with 3rd party Windows programs then Rip those in unix to get the MP3 formats. The above bashes help a lot.
…um… What if we don’t speak computer? What does all that mean?
Sorry Wilson, it probably means you are on the completely wrong page because this is how to convert WMA to MP3 files for Linux and if you don’t speak computer then I very much doubt you are a Linux user
Excellent! Anyone want to share how to recursively traverse directories to do this? And maybe removal of the wma file following encoding completion?
-Jonny5
Here is a similar script I made.
It can recursively look for files in subdirectories by passing -r, as well as it can remove the wma file for you by passing -d. The script does not need to remove any whitespaces, so you can use nice file names! ;D
It is a bit too long to post it here, so plz use this link: http://88.198.16.39/seek/make-mp3
You can easyly encode other files with it, just change the two functions on the top to do this.
I really hope somebody will find this script usefull, since it’s one of the first shellscripts I made. (filenames with whitespaces are cruel if you don’t know how to handle it ^^;)
Please send a mail if you have some improvements and/or better ideas.
Have a lot of fun!
Bernhard
#!/bin/bash
if [ $# -eq 0 ]
then
echo “Usage: `basename $0` FILE [FILE]…”
exit 1
fi
for source in “$@”; do
if [ -f “$source” ]; then
base=${source%.*} # remove suffix
base=`echo “$base” | tr ‘[A-Z]’ ‘[a-z]’`; #remove uppercase
base=`echo “$base” | tr ‘ ‘ ‘_’`; #remove spaces
tmp=$base.wav
dest=$base.mp3
if [ -e $tmp ]; then
echo “Could not create temporary file $tmp: file exists”;
exit 1;
fi
echo “Encoding $base.mp3”
rm -f $tmp
mkfifo $tmp
#Rip with Mplayer / encode with LAME
mplayer -quiet -vo null -vc null -ao pcm:waveheader:file=$tmp “$source” &>/dev/null \
& lame –quiet -m s $tmp -o $dest;
stat=$?
rm -f $tmp
if [ $stat -ne 0 ]; then
echo “Interupted”
exit $stat
fi
fi
done
This is perfect. Thanks Donncha
Yep,
Thanks since i”m using a “Peter Ndiku customed” code right now to do… , you guess ?
Sure that’s … Pop Corn. π
So thanks “Mesdames, Mesdedoiselles, Messieurs” to share, bloggy style…
You guys are a gr8 help. Thanks for the tips. BTW… -ao pcm -waveheader is deprecated… try -ao pcm:waveheader instead.
Hi all,
There is a nautilus script for this in the Ubuntu repo’s.
sudo apt-get install nautilus-script-audio-convert
Right click file then convert, nice n’ easy.
Dave
Thanks to this forum I managed to adapt the method to Mac OS. I used the script of Bernhard. On macs, the main difficulties are involved in installing mplayer. I described all the steps here: http://www.mimuw.edu.pl/~szymtor/wma2mp3.html. Hope its useful!
Awesome page !
Just learning how to script this year and am so glad I switched to Linux.
Been making a playlist for a big party from files of all types and it’s great to do everything from the terminal !
thanks for al the scripts
wbg
I’ve been struggling to find a way to do this without mplayer.
It’s been a pain the the a** to get it to a reasonably productive state, but this is how it goes:
1-run the command below to generate a script which will convert your files
2-check the script for apostrophes or single quites or double quotes in the names of your files
3-run the script
find -L /path/to/your/mp3/library -iname *.wma -exec echo 'vlc -v "{}" --sout '\'#transcode{acodec=mp3}:standard\{access=file,dst=\"{}.mp3\",mux=ffmpeg\}\''' \; >> batch_wma2mp3.sh; chmod u+x batch_wma2mp3.sh;this works w/latest Ubuntu & mplayer
#!/bin/bash
#
# Dump wma to mp3
for i in *.wma
do
if [ -f $i ]; then
rm -f $i.wav
mkfifo $i.wav
mplayer -vo null -vc dummy -af resample=44100 -ao pcm:waveheader $i -ao pcm:file=$i.wav &
dest=`echo $i|sed -e Γ’β¬Λs/wma$/mp3/Γ’β¬β’`
lame -h -b 192 $i.wav $dest
rm -f $i.wav
fi
done
You don’t need sed. Bash has all the functionality you need. And use trap to remove temporary files:
#! /bin/bash
set -eu
TMP=tmp.wav
trap 'rm -f "$TMP"' EXIT
mkfifo "$TMP"
for WMA in "$@" ; do
MP3=${WMA%.wma}.mp3
mplayer -quiet -vo null -vc dummy -af resample=44100 -ao "pcm:waveheader:file=$TMP:fast" "$WMA" &
lame -h -b 192 "$TMP" "$MP3"
done