Convert WMA to WAV - Cleanest method?

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gjd65585
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Joined: Fri Jun 23, 2006 11:44 am

Convert WMA to WAV - Cleanest method?

Post by gjd65585 »

What is the cleanest way to take a WMA 44100 Hz 129 kbps Stereo (typical musical audio from CD) and convert it to

Wave u-Law, 8000 Hz, 64 kbps, Mono.

I've done it, but it seemed clumsy. I have licensed music tracks that I need to convert to the wav format for on hold music.

Suggestions?

Chip
piano nick
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Post by piano nick »

Chip:

I'm interested as to what method you did use.

I would rip the tracks from the CD using Goldwave, (which is an automatic process that rips all tracks), then save to whatever format I wished. However, I've never had occasion to save in the U-Law format.

I believe that the files on a CD are CDA format, not WMA. I think WMA is Microsoft's verson of music file compression. Some say it is better than MP3.

If these are music tracks, it seems to me that 8,000 Hz, 64 kbps, mono won't yield terribly good results, but I may well be wrong. I frequent another music site, and MP3's aren't considered the best for listening.


PN
GoldWave Inc.
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Post by GoldWave Inc. »

Do you mean "cleanest" in terms of quality or in terms of the easiest method?

In terms of quality, if you have access to the original CD audio, then start with that (copied as 16 bit Wave) rather than the WMA file. Manually filtering the file using a lowpass filter with a cutoff of 3700Hz and the maximum steepness before resampling to 8000Hz and saving as "Wave u-Law, mono" may give slightly better quality, but the quality will be low at that sampling rate anyway.

In terms of the easiest method, use the File | Batch Processing command to select the Wave type, "u-Law, mono" attributes, and a 8000Hz rate.

Chris
gjd65585
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Post by gjd65585 »

Chris

Thank you, I used the CD Reader for the first time.

This is for Music on hold for phone system via network, so it's quality wont' be expected to be superior.

After reading the CD file, I first read the file as Wave file with attributes of MPeg Layer 3, 16Bit, 8000 Hz.

Then, I Saved As u-Law, mono.

Is this the suggested steps from your message when reading direct from disk? If I save directly to u-Law, it's saved as 44100 Hz at 352 Kpbs.

If already saved in another format, I could used the batch processsing (thanks, I had no idea it was even there) to convert the WMA directly, and that worked well also.

For Piano, basically that was what I did, open the WMA, save as Wave w/ attributes listed above, then back to u-Law.

Appreciate the comments from you both.

Chip
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Post by GoldWave Inc. »

I wouldn't recommend saving in MPEG format from the CD using such a low bitrate. The quality would be much lower because of the compression. Save as PCM 16 bit, then open the file and manually resample to 8000Hz with Effect | Resample, then save as u-Law (or use Batch Processing, which has a rate setting).

Chris
Togglehead
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Post by Togglehead »

^^^^what he said

I recently did the same thing, however my company uses .vox files at an even lower compression rate.

Rip from CD to top quality....and sample down from there.....
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