A Musical Conundrum...

[Trivun]

So, I happen to have a load of music that I want to convert, and yet have no reasonable way of doing it.

I'll start at the beginning to make it easier to understand. I have a lot of CDs. And I mean a lot. These were all bought and then ripped onto my family computer ages ago, and somehow ended up as a file format for iTunes, called the 'm4a' format. When I got a new laptop recently, I decided to transfer all my files (including the music) to the new computer, which has Dell Music Stage included. However, to play music in Music Stage, the files need to be .wma format. Any CD I rip to my computer now is included in .wma format, since I'm ripping them with Windows Media Player, but the rest of my music is .m4a instead. I can go through everything manually and convert the files that way, but lose the artist and album info, plus it'll take me hours to do. I could also delete all the music and rip them again seperately, but again that would take hours, and quite frankly I have better things to do with my time.

So, my question is this. Is there any way of converting lots of files automatically to the format I want, retaining all the extra info attached to the files (i.e. album and artist info)? I've tried a few programs downloaded from the internet, but they're all trial versions (I'm not paying £20 for something I'll only use once) and thus have 2-3 minute limitations on the length of songs converted, which is useless to me.

Finally, first person to post something that is actually useful and solves my problem completely gets a free wallpaper design for their computer, whatever that person's request is (I'll PM the winner to let them know), as a little incentive to help .

 

[Trivun]

snip

Okay, I don't know how helpful I can be but, here goes.

Firstly, you're converting from one lossy format to another lossy format. Unfortunately there will be some loss of quality when you do this.
(The quality loss will probably be imperceptible though.) If you re-ripped the music again straight from the source into wma there would be a minimum loss of quality.

Of course, this is just me being fussy.

If you're looking for free conversion software for audio, here are two:
SUPER
MediaCoder

I haven't used them to convert audio files with extended info tags though, so I'm unsure how they will handle that situation. Your mileage may vary.

I also must point out that both of these pieces of software are classified as adware.
That is to say, they are free, but will try to install other extraneous stuff during install.
So be careful during the install procedure, and "untick" anything ad-based (toolbars and the like).

[sup]If, by the slimmest possibility, this post is helpful to you, don't worry about a wallpaper for me. I don't need an incentive, I always like helping people![/sup]

One more thing; the Advice Forum is a good place to start a thread if you need help with anything.
Threads turn over much more slowly there then they do in Off Topic, so you're much more likely to get a reply.

Anyway, I hope this has been a help to you, and good luck!

Heh, I'd actually completely forgotten about the Advice Forum, but thanks. If this doesn't get any useful help within a day or so then I'll repost in the right place, or ask a mod to move it. Also, I'll definitely check out those two links you mentioned and see if they do the trick. I'm not massively fussed about sound quality, as long as the songs are there and sound at least decent I'm fine with it. I just want to be able to listen to it all through Dell Music Stage .