MP3 to WMA

are there any applications that would convert MP3's directly into WMA files without having to first convert back to WAV? With my 10G filled and WMA files being half the size of MP3, I was curious to try any app that would allow me to save space by converting from one format to another. Ultimately I would be installing an additional HD, but time and funds don't allow that at the moment.

Any feedback?

Thanks,

Ed

How about the wma output plugin in winamp (2.x)? Free.

-Zeke

well...honestly don't know anything about that...please let me know how I could work it to do what I want....Ed

What you're proposing is a pretty bad idea. If you convert from MP3 to WMA, regardless of whether any actual WAV files are generated, you're going to lose quality in such a conversion, and it's going to be a lot more quality than you would lose if you started with the original CD's or WAV files and went to straight to WMA. Any MP3->WMA conversion process *has* to have an intermediate step where the MP3 file is decoded and then encoded into WMA format, even if it's done in memory, without WAV files. So the WAV file produced by decoding the MP3 will have MP3 quality loss, and re-encoding that file in WMA will lose further quality.

Ripping the original CD's and encoding them in WMA from the beginning is a much better idea. This obviously isn't possible if you don't have the original CD's. Having said that, I would strongly recommend against "converting" from MP3 to WMA because you have 2 lossy compression steps instead of just one.

http://classic.winamp.com/download/

download it. install it.
Options, preferences, output, 'Nullsoft WMA output plug-in'

Ed, please make sure to read this.