[H-GEN] Resampling MP3's

[Geoff Shang]

Harry Phillips wrote:

> I have been using k3b to burn the music to a CD-RW, then use grip to rip
> them at 64k reducing the whole album to ~22M and allowing me to fit it
> onto my card.

Note that at 64kbps, you'll either need to downmix to mono or reduce the 
sampling rate.

> I have read the man pages of lame and a few other MP3 tools and I have
> searched but not figured out how to resample the MP3's/OGG's at a lower
> rate.

Examples to leave them as stereo (lame will reduce the sampling rate 
automatically, to 24kHz I think):

MP3: lame --mp3input -b 64 <infile> <outfile>
Ogg Vorbis: oggdec --quiet -o - <infile> |lame -b 64 - <outfile>

Notes:

1.  The --quiet option is to stop oggdec's progress indicator from getting 
in the way of lame's.

2.  To keep 44.1kHz sampling and downmix to mono instead, add the -a switch 
to the lame commandline.

3.  Lame has a quality setting.  If you want to retain as much quality as
    possible, you may want to use it.  Quality 3 is used by default, 1 is
    high enough for most people, 0 takes several times longer than 1 does to
    try and get that last bit of extra quality.  To use this, add -q <value>
    to the lame commandline.

Hope this helps,
Geoff.