The VideoLAN Forums

Hi Friends,

I am a complete newbie to this site. I have, I think, a simple question. I am working in Garage Band on a Mac and would like to send files to other musicians. I can send them MP3s but some prefer wav files. Can VLC convert MP3s to wav or other audio formats? How is it done? Is there a great difference in sound quality, file size between MP3s and other formats? Any other tips about converting files would be helpful. Thanks in advance for your help.


Best,

alton

VLC can transcode to other formats. It isn't necessarily the best transcoder though since e.g. the output file length can be slightly different (by a few milliseconds so not much difference ) - i.e. not bit-for-bit identical.

MP3 is a lossy audio compression algorithm. WAV is uncompressed audio. Trancoding from a lossy format to another lossy format isn't recommended as you lose quality by doing that.

If you want to convert e.g. a MP3 file to a WAV file in VLC try the commandline: Where INPUT is your source file, and OUTPUT is you destination (e.g. "/home/username/output.wav" for a *nix based system).

The input can be any audio format that VLC can play.

If you wanted to e.g. convert to AAC (MP4 container): Where INPUT is your input file and OUTPUT is your destination (so, as above but with a different extension, e.g. ""/home/username/output.mp4").

The bitrate in the example above is 128kbps - can be changed (to e.g. 160, 192, 256, 320 etc.). Also the sample rate can be changed (to e.g. 48000Hz).

Cheers, Arite.

Maybe our wiki sucks for that part.
Arite, could you add this to our streaming howto? (A new page, I would say)

Sure, I have made a new page called "Streaming HowTo New" in the Documentation namespace:
http://wiki.videolan.org/Documentation: ... _HowTo_New

I thought a whole new page was better than adding a subpage to the old Streaming HowTo to avoid mixing old/new content. There is already an article on transcoding (here), although that is slightly outdated too and focuses on using the commandline. So I thought I'd write a fresh description of transcoding using the GUI and commandline using VLC 1.0.x (and later).

Cheers, Arite.

Well, the old streaming howto is missing a page for convertion, so I believe you should add this streaming howto in the TOC.

OK, well I could move the article to be a Streaming HowTo subpage? I have added links to it in the Streaming HowTo TOC and main Streaming HowTo page (called "Convert files to other formats".

Arite.