Recommend best free program / guide for mp3 reencoding?

[Batchman]

You all are the best for information on this kind of thing, so I'll ask another of my roughly one question a year questions.

I live for audio books, since I have a driving job and spend huge amounts of time on the road, but for something that is just reading books out loud, some people encode things at absurdly high bit rates.

Recommendations for guide and program to simply reencode .mp3s at a lower bitrate without horrible changes in quality. (I know there will be some loss, but often it won't be noticeable in such files.)

Thanks in advance for your help.

[CobraPilot]

VLC

I, too, like to listen to audio books and other programs on long trips. Using VLC, if the audio is mostly spoken word, I've often taken the bitrate down to 32 kbs without much noticeable quality loss.

[bat999]

Hi
WinFF-v1.4 is a good converter.
Simple to use.
From here ---> http://winff.org/html_new/

It only has one mp3 setting, that's 160Kbps.
(EDIT. I've just noticed, in the 'Mobile Phones' section there is also an mp3 32Kbps mono pre-set)

But in the attachment below are some extra mp3 pre-sets for WinFF.

Unzip the pre-sets.
Filename is "extra_mp3_presets.wff".
To install them in WinFF...

WinFF > Edit > Presets > Import > SAVE

When you've finished, the extra presets will be in the 'Audio' section.
They are:-

32 Kbps Stereo
64 Kbps Stereo
96 Kbps Stereo
128 Kbps Stereo

[Moontrash]

that's an easy one

LameXp

[Batchman]

Thank you for the suggestions ... I'll start with VLC, and see how it does ... if needed, I will try further ones.

Again, thank you!

EDIT -- Couldn't figure out how to convert with VLC, so went on to WinFF with the attached presets ... easy to use, and fairly quick. Personally, I can't notice any difference in quality, and saving 50% disc space on my first book!

[nic2k4]

Convert to windows media format (WMA) with Freemake Audio Converter. WMA can record the same quality at a lower bitrate, so even if you're re-encoding MP3's you should get better results.