What do you do?

There’s plenty of software solutions out there…

• SUPER – Free, converts anything, a bit dodgy.
• Various FFmpeg based projects – Free
• dBpoweramp Music Converter – 30 days free trial
• Daniusoft MP3 WAV Converter – Free
• Audio MP3 WAV WMA OGG Converter – Shareware
• All To MP3 Converter – Shareware
• WinFF – Free, Open source.

… but none of these really did what I wanted.

I decided to make my own tool.

My premiss was to make a bulk wma to mp3 converter for windows, that appears on context menus.

I figured that I could probably get away with using the “Send To” context menus instead.

I also figured that I could use the windows release of ffmpeg (windows binary contained within the 7zip files which open with WinRAR) at the core to do the actual conversion.

My advice would be to extract ffmpeg.exe to your “system32″ directory so we can call it from anywhere.

I figured out by using WinFF, that the command is as follows:

ffmpeg -i “in.wma” -acodec libmp3lame -ab 160k -ac 2 -ar 44100 “out.mp3″
Note: WinFF uses “mp3″ instead of “libmp3lame” due to the way it’s compiled

The next step was to figure out how to pass the arguments to ffmpeg.exe so it knew the input and output file.

In the end I settled on VBscript, thanks to a very handy documentation entitled “Introduction to VBScript“.

What I needed to do in psudo terms is as follows:

Get <arguments> as <input>
For Each <input> as <item>
Check <item> is a “.wma” file
Replace .wma with .mp3 on end of <item>
Run ffmpeg
Tell us when it’s all done

In VBS, you are unable to “replace”, so instead I simply trimmed the last 3 chrs (wma) and added “mp3″.

Also to insert quotes (since there’s no escaping) you simply use chr(34).

Another article worth mentioning is entitled “Running Programs From WSH Scripts“. It helps explain the difference between Run and Exec, and the ways in which to use them.

Here’s the script I ended up with:

Set objS = WScript.Arguments
i = 0
For Each objIN in objS
objINext=Right(objIN,3)
If objINext = “wma” Then
objINCount=len(objIN)
objINCount=objINCount-3
objOUT=Left(objIN,objINCount)&”mp3″
objExec=”ffmpeg.exe -i “&chr(34)&objIN&chr(34)&” -acodec libmp3lame -ab 160k -ac 2 -ar 44100 “&chr(34)&objOUT&chr(34)
Set objShell = CreateObject(“WScript.Shell”)
objShell.Run(objExec), 1, true
End If
i = i + 1
Next
WScript.Echo “Done!”

Go to Start -> Run, enter: “sendto”, click OK or press Enter.

Create a New Text Document in there, open it, and paste in the above script, then rename it to “wma-to-mp3.vbs”.

That’s it, all done!

Now when you right click on a WMA file, and go to the “Send To” menu, you will see an option called “wma-to-mp3.vbs”, click on that, and the process will begin.

Note: I am aware that there are limits to this script, but it does the job. Let me know of any improvements you make, and enjoy!

No related posts.

I figured out that there must be a way we can get our hands on the actual mp3 files found on the myspace music player.

All we had to do was decode their site so we are able to grab their mp3s.

For this example, you will need Mozilla Firefox.

1. Search for the myspace page of a band or artist. eg: ferry costen
2. Visit their profile page. eg: http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=26949175
3. Look at the HTML code (CTRL+U in Firefox).
   • Find the “mp3player”.
   • Find a the “src=”http://lads.myspace.com/music/musicplayer.swf?n=a” line eg: src=“http://lads.myspace.com/music/musicplayer.swf?n=aHR0cDovL211c2ljLm15c3BhY2UuY29t&t=2zZraik8ig5S9ktLf2NZejuI1axbBcWJV1tcidA7Df2ccYSYBeFi1X+rKSaHUvsuu+H+TZdIsFm1/Wos9jKd/Q==&u=LTE=&a=1&d=MjY5NDkxNzVeMTIwMTU0NzE0OA==”
   • Get the Live HTTP Headers addon for Firefox and open it to capture mode.
     
   • Visit the URL between the quotes.

4. You should see something that looks like this: “http://mediaservices.myspace.com/services/media/musicplayerxml.ashx?b=26949175“.
5. Visit the URL
   • You will find the “durl” eg: durl=”http://cache02-music01.myspacecdn.com/16/std_8f66fa49e964209826356ce9f579541f.mp3″.
   • You will also find the title=”Into The Dark Ferry Fix”, which is useful when saving, to give them real names.

So in case you didn’t notice, all you really need is the “FriendID” and the mediaservices.myspace.com URL, and in future you can access the playlist for any band or artist, and download all the tracks they have on their profile.

It’s worth knowing how to figure it out, in case their system changes.

Resources

• http://himself.wordpress.com/2007/01/24/downloading-mp3s-from-myspace-bands-revisited/
• http://tom.drastic.net/archives/11
• http://forum.readingfestivalonline.co.uk/archive/index.php/t-33463.html

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After a while of listening to the music stored on my computer and my good old CD collection I find myself getting bored of it and in search for something new.

The sure way of getting hold of new music is to go online and look for it.

My first port of call for free music is BBC Radio1, where you can “listen live” or even “listen again” meaning you can listen to any previous shows, this is good if you like a particular show or type of music. One of the main problems is that you are required to use RealPlayer (if you’re in the UK, you can use Windows Media Player as well) to listen to the radio streams.

Of course as you probably know, there are some limits with this, including the fact that the music is rather general, and sometimes the presenter can get annoying.

Another radio streaming option is WinAmp’s Shoutcast based radio stations. The situation is that nullsoft (the company that makes winamp) released a streaming server application that can be used for free. People all over the world use this to run their own online radio station, ultimately meaning that there is a lot of choice. Best of all you can listen using Winamp or your choice of media player.

If like me you are a fan of dance music (in particular trance), you’ll probably find that Digitally Imported is probably one of the best online radio stations out there. They offer everything from Trance right through to Euro Dance to Gabber.

If streaming audio using third party media players isn’t your thing then don’t worry, there’s still more options out there.

As part of a new generation of websites Pandora offers the ability to listen to your choice of music via an embedded flash player. The question I am sure you’ll be asking is “how does it work?” well basically Pandora has a huge collection of music, and a huge database of recommendations from users. Simply, you put in a song that you like and you are provided with a radio station that seamlessly plays music that other users who liked that song recommended. It works very well most of the time. One of the best features of this site is that if you don’t like the current track, you can skip onto the next track.
A similar concept is Last.fm which is probably a bit better as it appears to have more users, and allows for integration with your media player meaning it has better recommendations and feedback to utilise.

Yahoo! have recently jumped on this band wagon and released Yahoo! Music, which appears to offers a similar service to Pandora and Last.fm, you can expect this to be quite good.

Another site that I am forced to mention is of course MySpace, as you are probably aware MySpace was originally created so that bands could get better known, and bands have chosen to take advantage of this by offering their music via MySpace’s music player. This is a good option if you want to listen to a few tracks at a time by particular artists.

mp3.com has existed for many years now, far longer than MySpace, I remember downloading PPK – resurrection from this site years ago.

mercora.com is fairly new offering music search and internet radio network, I have yet to try this out to its full extent.
There are plenty more sites out there, this is just a short list of reliable sites that really work.

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