Impulsive Geekery

I’m taking a class from Jake Warga at the Hugo House. Several of the other students use minidisc recorders and those with Windows PCs were having problems editing their work because the minidisc importing tools only write files in Windows Media (WMA) format. Audacity the free editing software that many people use doesn’t read or import WMAs. So, I set off to find some free conversion apps that are easy to use. Here’s what I found:

Many people use dbpoweramp Music Converter. It’ll not only convert sound files from one format to the other, but rip music from CDs as well, tapping into the massive All Media Guide to tag files. Better still, it’s easy to use and mostly free. (mostly free = the application is free to use, but the MP3 writing feature can only be used free for 30 days. After that, you can continue to use the app, but you can’t write MP3s. That’s fine because for our purposes, we want to write uncompressed WAV files.

You’ll need to download and install two things:

• dbpoweramp Music Converter - the main application


• Windows Media codec for dbpoweramp - this is the piece that knows how to decode WMA files.

1. Dump all your minidisc audio somewhere on your hard disk
2. Run the dbpoweramp Music converter. The first thing it’ll do is prompt you for the files to convert. Go to the directory you put all your mindisc recordings and select all of them.

3. Now you’ll get the conversion dialog. Set it to convert to wave. Better yet, make it look just like this (click for full-size):

4. Click the Convert button and watch it chug. When you’re done, you’ll have both WAV and WMA versions of your file:

Note those file sizes - uncompressed WAVs are usually about 10 times as big as the WMA, so keep an eye on your disk space.