How do I reduce the bitrate of MP3 files (e.g. to fit more songs into my portable player)?
Well you’d have to convert them to WAV files (Winamp can do this – use the Nullsoft Diskwriter Output plugin, which comes with the standard Winamp install), and then re-encode them using an MP3 encoder (BladeEnc is a free encoder which I’ve found pretty good). But you will certainly lose some quality. So far as I know, the only way of converting bitrates is to decode the files and then encode them at the new rate. I assume you’re wanting to encode them at a lower rate in order to make them smaller. (There’s absolutely no point encoding them at a higher rate, since it won’t improve the quality at all, and it will simply make the files bigger.) There may be a utility to do this in batches, but I don’t know of one. However, you can easily do each of the two stages in batches, so long as you have enough hard disk space: 1) Use Winamp to create WAV files. Under preferences (Ctrl-P) select as Output the Nullsoft Diskwriter plugin, and press the Configure button to choose the directory for yo
