I've got a bunch of mp3s, mainly rock. They take up too much space.
What's the best format to put them in to save space, and can you find
a free program that'll automatically convert an entire directory into
that format? I'm running Win2k. I use winamp. This page
http://www.litexmedia.com/article/tests.html makes it seem like mp3pro
would be the best format to put them in, but I'm not clear on whether
that format is currently in widespread use.

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Clarification of Question by gremlin-ga on 02 Mar 2003 21:37 PST

I'm looking for a quality that's at least comparable to a 96kb/s mp3.

There's a trade-off between size and audio quality.  The encoding that
saves the most space is likely to have the worst sound.  If you want
to maintain the same quality, I suspect you can't do much better than
MP3 for compression.  If you are willing to trade some quality for
space, you will probably have to test different recoding rates to see
what you can stand.  It might help the researchers advise you if you
can give some idea of how much quality degradation you think you can
accept.

--efn

Hi gremlin,
I personally think that Windows Media Audio is more efficient than
MP3.  The Windows Media Bonus Pack includes a handy MP3 Audio
Converter which allows you to convert a whole folder of MP3 into WMA
format.  However, the download is only available for Windows XP.  But
perhaps you can still download it and see if it works on Win2K as
well.

Sorry, the link is
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/download/bpmp3convert.aspx
secret901-ga