Assume you have a whole mess of WAV files that you want to convert. First let's turn them into MP3s. lame --preset insane *wav This basically creates the mp3 at 320, which is, uh, insane, but it's the highest quality level. If its not 320, I don't want it. You may choose 192 or above; unless it's speech, I would NEVER use anything less than 192. Now let's convert your WAVs to FLAC files. shntool conv -o flac *.wav If you're using a Debian-based system, you'll probably need to do this first: sudo apt-get install shntool Is that not easy or what? (Check out all of our posts on conversions, WAV, MP3, & FLAC.) ...

OK, here's the situation: you have some sounds, but you don't like they sound. Sounds like you want your sounds to sound like another sound. So it sounds like you need to convert those sounds to another sound. So how do you do that? SoundConverter, of course! It outputs as Ogg Vorbis, MP3, FLAC, or WAV, & for OGG & MP3 you can choose a quality level, which is as it should be. OK, fine, but what's it accept as input? Why, anything that GStreamer can read. On my system, that means the following, plus a WHOLE lot more: mp3, wav, FLAC, Windows Media Audio, Real, Shorten, and the list goes on and on and on. SoundConverter does its job quickly, and it just … works. Sounds like you should give it a try! (Check out all of our posts on OGG, mp3, FLAC, sound, & music.) ...

If you've ever developed an open source media application, you've probably stumbled across the problems with dealing with proprietary formats and their codecs. There's some hope though. XVid have tried to develop strong open MPEG 4 codecs, and the Xiph.org Foundation host and support numerous open codec projects. The most popular Xiph.org backed codec is Vorbis (sometimes known as Ogg Vorbis - in reference to the Ogg container format), an audio codec competing against MP3, but developers may not be aware of other open source codecs and technologies which can be used with Ogg: Tremor: An integer based version of Vorbis for audio work on embedded devices Theora: A video codec Flac: A loss-less audio codec Speex: A voice audio format, designed for ultra low file sizes and bit rates OggWrite: Designed for text encapsulation, for subtitles, closed captions, etc. Ogg Metadata: A generic meta data format. ...