How To Convert Audio File Formats - When You Can

There should be a law, like Murphy's Law, only for music file downloading. It would go, "The desirability of a song is directly proportional to the chances of it being in a file format from the planet Pluto." You can go to any BitTorrent tracking site and read it in the comments: "Alright! The missing song (Warning) from Black Sabbath's first album! How'd you find this treasure?" and then a couple of posts later, "Who in blue blazes uses tar and gzip to archive a file and then it turns out the song's in ATRAC3 format?"

Well, things might not be as bad as all that; there are many ways to convert files from one format to another. In some cases, it's easier than others.

Online converters
The quickest and easiest way to convert audio files is to use an online service.

• Zamzar converts between various media file formats, including audio.
• Media Convert is another such service.
• Convert Files is yet another.

Online converters are usually up to the task for those one-shot situations. But there can be drawbacks sometimes:

• The sites are sometimes down or out of service.
• It's slow. Typically you have to give them your email address and they'll notify you when it's done.
• The quality isn't always everything you'd hope for. Many of these services state that they are in perpetual beta, which means nothing is guaranteed ever.
• You sacrifice your privacy. Not all of us want every media file we own potentially broadcast to the world.

And anyway, for converting large batches of files, uploading them one at a time to a site becomes a non-optimal solution. So there's the alternative of using installed software to convert on your own device, without going online:

Direct Software Conversion
This is quite simple: format A goes in, format B comes out, happy ending. Some of the best tools are:

• iTunes, as of version 8, can convert between MP3, AIFF, WAV, MPEG-4, AAC and ALE. If you're running an iPod already, you're good to go here.
• MediaCoder, a batch media transcoder. It runs on Windows and it's open-source and free. Check the page for supported formats - over forty audio and video formats!
• FFmpeg, a cross-platform recorder, converter and streamer for audio and video files. Open-source and free, and runs on Linux, Mac, and Windows. It supports a broad scattering of audio and video formats, including ATRAC, Vorbis, WMA, and the MPEG family. It also supports online protocols, from HTTP to... Gopher! Yeah, like people still use Gopher!
• SONY's Sound Forge, a family of commercial audio editing software. If you don't mind spending the money and you're looking for professional quality, (e.g. you run a recording studio), you might look into this.
• Finally, Audacity is a free, open-source audio editor which runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, and BSD. Audacity is a quite sophisticated tool, used by many intermediate professionals. Started at Carnegie Mellon University, and the original developer for Audacity now works for Google, if that tells you anything. Support for importing and exporting to WAV, AIFF, MP3, Vorbis, and FLAC, amongst others.

Direct file conversion has one pitfall: Audio data quality might be lost. This isn't a problem when the original file is in an uncompressed or lossless compressed format, but can be a problem when going from one lossy compressed format to another. This is because different lossy compression codecs throw away different parts of the audio data. If you've ever converted an image from a JPEG to a GIF, you have an idea of what's happening, only with audio data instead.

Another "gotcha" is converting between different bitrates. For example, an MP3 file encoded at 128 KB/second going to an AAC file encoded at 192 KB/second will lose some sound quality. Isn't that a lovely headache?

Other Conversion Methods:

If you're stuck with something you just can't make work with direct audio conversion, you have two last measures to throw at the problem, both of which are painful:

• Burn 'n' Rip: Use a CD-burning program and a CD-RW to burn your music files onto a CD. Then use a CD-ripping program to get the files back off the CD in a different format. This might be the only option when you're confronted with DRM-protected files.
• Audio capture. The absolute last resort: play the file out of some speakers, use a microphone to capture the analog audio and record it into a different format. This is just as painful as it sounds. There are some software programs that will help with this, but really, even the best methods used in audio capture will still feel like you're living in a Rube Goldberg cartoon. Anybody not using a professional sound studio setup can expect poor quality this way.

The best file format to convert to is MP3. This is because MP3 is so widely supported, you can't go wrong here; even $20 generic media players made in China play MP3s.

In closing: Audio conversion kind of feels primitive at this point in history simply because digital multimedia is so young. We've only been doing this for about 20 years now. As time goes on and the industry becomes a bit more civilized, expect the world of audio files to settle down and the tools for converting to become a little more user-friendly.

On a side note, do be a good Internet citizen: When offering audio files to another, do use the highest-quality and most commonly-supported file format you can. Using a common format makes it easier on others, and using a high-quality (lossless compression or uncompressed) format ensures that the audio quality will survive a conversion or two. It also is a good thing to remind others to do this, since some people just never think of it.