Optimal Audio Type Converter

Music is everywhere now and not seldom have we carried around our favorite songs on mobile phones, MP3 players, Walkman, you name it. Since digital is the key word in our world, we need to store and play dozens, even hundreds of tunes, thus stretching the capacity of the device designed to host them to the limit. To better accommodate the hordes of tracks we often have to make small miracles for squeezing the last kilobyte of disc space available.

The first and most obvious thing to do is load the files with lesser dimension because, this way, the quantity of songs will be greater. However, usually a smaller file means one of the two: shorter duration or diminished audio quality. Sometimes both criteria apply, but the former is the one you must really focus on due to the fact that re-encoding digital sound to lower the size on disk automatically reduces the qualitative parameters.

Therefore, it's very important to keep a standard as high as possible when converting your music because you won't mind as much listening to fewer songs than you would if you were forced to hear a heap of lousy sounding tracks.

Depending on the type supported by the player of choice (MP3 in most cases but not exclusively) you'll need a piece of software able to handle the required formats and offer a decent set of quality settings. Processing speed and system resource usage are something you have to keep an eye out for as well, not to mention the level of the resulting output. Since the list of tools designed especially for converting audio files is rather extensive, as usual, to narrow the search, you should go for the freebies in the first place because amongst their ranks, there's surely one to suit your needs.

A handy utility, lightweight and quite easy to use is Free WMA MP3 Converter. It will help you encode your songs fast and to the desired quality level without asking in return nothing more than a cut of CPU seasoned with a pinch of RAM as it's otherwise costless. There is less focus on looks with this application because it needs not clutter your computer; the functional aspects being the ones that prevail from a simple interface that has all the commands upfront. The program can be operated by any user, more or less experienced, thanks to the clean-cut settings and buttons that don't require any special skills or particular knowledge.

This software can work with three different audio types, namely MP3, WMA and WAV, performing all the possible conversions among them with the same easiness. The first thing you need to do is configure from the Options menu the output folder where you want to store the encoded files. In the Output tab, you'll also find two available configurations pertaining to the Tag Editor dialog that can be either visible or hidden during the conversion and to the path for the resulting tunes that can be the same as the source. If you opt to keep the input directory as the place where the converted songs will be kept, bear in mind that this means you'll overwrite the original audios. A confirmation dialog will eventually inform you about this just before starting the actual transcoding process.

For working with MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 files, Free WMA MP3 Converter uses the LAME encoder with several bit rate and channel options available. Hence, you can choose to have MP3s with constant or variable bit rate up to 320 kilobits per second. For the VBR (variable bit rate), the software allows you to limit the minimum and maximum values and more than that, pick a quality level from 0 to 9. Channels section will enable you to manually select from Stereo, Joint Stereo, Dual Channels and Mono, while the last available function gives you the opportunity to decide the processor usage. If you move the slider towards More, the songs will be converted faster, as a larger amount of CPU will be allocated to the task.

Insofar as the Windows Media Audio format is concerned (the same being true for the WAV type), the configurations depend mainly on the capabilities of the codec you set to be used. For example, the Windows Media Audio 10 Professional has a top format of 768 kbps at 96 kHz, 7.1 channel 24 bits, but you should be alright with anything starting from 128 kbps at 44 kHz. Here, you can also activate the VBR setting that will allow a higher bit rate and therefore more disk space for complicated segments with fewer expanses for uncomplicated portions of the music files. If you simply want to change the format for your tunes, then the default configuration will do a fine job so you won't need to manually go through all of the profile variables.

Once you're done customizing the options, all that's left for you to do is click on the desired conversion type in the main window of the application. Then, you can choose one or more songs to be processed and then the wheels will start turning.

A useful feature of Free WMA MP3 Converter could come out of hiding at this moment and it's the Tag Editor. This module not only shows the original ID3 tag when available, but it will also allow you to personalize it on the spot. When the actual conversion takes place, it will need under 2 MB or system memory, but the CPU usage will peak over 70 percent. The data was obtained on a system featuring a Dual-Core 1.9 GHz AMD Athlon 64-bit processor with 2 GB of RAM.

The Good The software earns some points thanks to the good feature pack that offers sufficient customizations for the output formats and also because it's so easy to use. The quality of the resulting music files is very good and the processing speed is not a problem for this freeware utility.

The Bad

The Truth