taking many 198k mp3 files and converting them to 16k mp3

[andrew clarke]

On Sat, Aug 26, 2006 at 10:36:54PM -0700, Gary Kline wrote:

> Is there a way of using sox (or another translator) to turn HUGE  
> audio mp3 files into much much smaller files?  Say taking man mp3 
> files that are stored at 198k high fidelity and outputting these to 
> 16k or 32k mp3 (or *.ogg or other format) audio files?

LAME (audio/lame in Ports) will do conversions:

bash-2.05b$ lame -b 32 -h Python411_060823_Milestones.mp3 
ID3v2 found. Be aware that the ID3 tag is currently lost when transcoding.
LAME version 3.96.1 (http://lame.sourceforge.net/)
CPU features: MMX (ASM used), 3DNow! (ASM used)
Resampling:  input 32 kHz  output 22.05 kHz
Using polyphase lowpass filter, transition band:  8269 Hz -  8535 Hz
Encoding Python411_060823_Milestones.mp3
      to Python411_060823_Milestones.mp3.mp3
Encoding as 22.05 kHz  32 kbps single-ch MPEG-2 Layer III (11x) qval=2
    Frame          |  CPU time/estim | REAL time/estim | play/CPU |    ETA 
   600/40388  ( 1%)|    0:07/    8:35|    0:07/    8:51|   2.0471x|    8:43 

etc.

If you want to do multiple files you'll need to write a script to call
LAME multiple times.