Ogg and the Music Man

When Mireth Technology, the makers of MacVCD and iVCD, released Music Man (formerly MacMP3CD) a few days ago I was curious to see if it would simplify the process of converting songs from my MP3 collection to 48Kbps Ogg files for my P800 phone. My current method involves batch converting MP3s to WAV with MACAST MP3 Converter and then converting the WAVs to Ogg with Ogg Drop X.

After installing Music Man as per the instructions, I discovered that in order to convert MP3s to Oggs I would need to install the LAME MP3 encoder as well as the Ogg Vorbis Quicktime component. I already had the Ogg component installed, and after a quick read of this I was ready. Note: installing LAME 3.96 resulted in an error at the end of the make install process - the error was make: *** [install-recursive] Error 1, however the encoder seems to be installed correctly, since Music Man MP3 conversions now work correctly.

All of the above only took 20 minutes or so, and soon after that I was merrily converting MP3s to Ogg in just one click. Very handy, although watching the output folder shows that Music Man converts the MP3 to WAV before reconverting to Ogg, so the actual workflow appears to be similar to my previous two step process. However, I was disappointed to discover that Music Man does not apparently allow you to set the bitrate of your output Oggs. They appear to be 128Kbps files, which is too large for me to consider using on a mobile phone with only a 128MB memory card.

Related entries

The Land of Ogg - 15 July 2004
Converting audio tape to CD - 18 August 2004
Sonos on a Mac - 21 February 2005
HP no longer in the iPod business - 30 July 2005
Ultimate digital music - 15 January 2005
Encoding for SmartMovie - 23 May 2004
RealVideo to SmartMovie - 26 August 2004
Real Mplayer - 9 October 2004
Full screen video on the P800 - 21 May 2004

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