AAC MP3 twist on MP3 capable NW

[eesn]

hi guys,

here's the bit.

I have an MP3-capable Sony NW-E405, which is a mere 512M.

I, however, prefer iTunes as my library software and store my files in AAC (sounds better to me).

Now, it makes sense to keep M4As in 160+ kbit, but to upload to the Sony, i'd need to convert them back to 160+ kbit MP3, and it's difficult to squeeze too many of them on the Walkman. Sure, iTunes converts from AAC to MP3 just fine, but the quality is inferior, compared to, say, LAME. And I'm wary of downloading bloatware/spyware/any-fishy-looking-software.

But manual transcoding loses the ID3 tags.

So the task was to automatically convert a folder of M4A (AAC) files to filtered, 128 or less kbit MP3, for upload via MP3FM/Windows, while preserving the ID3 tags.

I've compiled a package to do this on my machine. Runs on Windows XP, using command line utilities (all provided, nothing extra to download). It does ID3V1 tags but that's better than nothing..

If anybody's interested, it's a 1.5M archive, takes reading some brief instructions to get it working.

Give me a shout, if you want to test it, I'll send it over.

/g

Edited July 15, 2006 by eesn