converting TO .wma?

Hope you guys can help with this annoying little problem of mine. I have a Creative Rhomba mp3 player (the older one, 128 mb). I hate having to encode stuff in mp3 to put onto the device, because to get it small enough to fit a good album on there, the sound suffers a lot more than I would like. The only other sound format it accepts in .wma.

Back in the day, before I dropped windows entirely, I used to just encode the music to .wma, which produced smaller, better sounding files. What is the best way to do this? Or can anyone suggest a better way to encode mp3s to diminish the inherent lossyness in smaller files? I'm currently running Suse 9.3 (dual boot w/ Fedora core 4) and was using Audacity to encode to mp3 (lame). Any help would be greatly appreciated...

I don't mean to brush off your question, but I think the easiest route at this point is to put the old Creative player out to pasture and pick up something a bit more hardy, perhaps with more storage space so the codec doesn't matter. I've never tried to encode WMA in Linux, since frankly I find the sound of a 160kb MP3 file better, and it's not tied to MS Windows. There are lots of music players on the market today that play more than just MP3 and WMA.

You might also be interested in compressing sound files into the Ogg Vorbis format. Some players now support this (though not enough) and it's very good indeed. IMHO ogg is every bit as good in terms of sound quality as mp3. The files are smaller too.

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Originally Posted by techieMoe

I don't mean to brush off your question, but I think the easiest route at this point is to put the old Creative player out to pasture and pick up something a bit more hardy, perhaps with more storage space so the codec doesn't matter. I've never tried to encode WMA in Linux, since frankly I find the sound of a 160kb MP3 file better, and it's not tied to MS Windows. There are lots of music players on the market today that play more than just MP3 and WMA.

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Unfortunately, that was pretty much the answer I feared. I do have a 30 gig player Zen jukebox, but was hoping to be able to use the smaller guy when working out or jogging or whatever. Fingal, yeah, I would have used ogg if possible, but it won't fly in this case.

Either way, thanks for the responses. Looks like its almost time to upgrade...

I heard a rumour that Mencode will do it, but I don't buy into it. Have you had a look to see about unofficial firmware that includes Ogg support?