While this is not a problem on modern computer systems where hard drives with Terabytes of data become the norm. It could however play a role with mobile devices like cell phones or mp3 players. These have seen a storage increase in the last two years as well but it is still not uncommon to see cell phones or mp3 players with a few Gigabytes of storage or even less.

It might make sense to reduce the quality of the music to be able to store more of it on the devices. It is obviously up to the individual user to find an acceptable quality setting. One application that can modify the quality of music.

The software is pretty easy to use. It takes only a few clicks to modify the quality. The user can drag and drop music into the interface. Various information such as the name, size or bitrate are displayed automatically. The last step before the conversion is to select a preset which ranges from high quality over portable and compromise to low quality with the option to add custom presets to the application.

A preset is made up of a sample frequency, bitrate mode, rate and modus. Conversion takes only a few seconds per song and can remove the original if that is wanted by the user. The results page will list the size differences between the original and the conversion. MP3 Quality Modifier can be downloaded from the developer’s website.

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The first thing to do is to get mpg123 installed. This can be done very quickly via command line. One of the following commands will do the trick (depending upon which distribution you use):

apt-get install mpg123

urpmi mpg123

If you are using Fedora Core you will most likely have to stop by rpm.pbone.net, download the correct rpm package and install with the command:

rpm -ivh mpg123-RELEASE_NUMBER.rpm

Where RELEASE_NUMBER is the actual release number you download.

Once installed you are ready to go.

With the wav files located in a directory change to that directory to run the command. The format of the command will be:

mpg123 -w file.wav file.mp3

The “-w” argument tells mpg123 that the output will be in the .wav format. The first file name is the output file name which is user configurable. A word of warning, spaces in file names aren’t always the best choice in the Linux operating system. If you want to separate words in a file name you can use “_” character. So creating a .wav of Rush’s Tom Sawyer you would do something like:

mpg123 -w Rush_Tom_Sawyer.wav “01 – Tom Sawyer.mp3″

Batch Conversion

What about batch conversion? This requires a bit of shell scripting. Create a Music directory (in modern Linux distributions there should be one in ~/) and dump all of your mp3 files into that directory. Next, create a shell script in your favorite text editor. We’ll call that script “batch_conversion”. The contents of the script might look like:

#!/usr/bin/perl
my $dir = “~/Music”;
opendir DH, $dir or die “Can’t open $dir: $!”;
$count2=1;
while ($name = readdir DH) {
next unless $name =~ /\.mp3$/;
$wav=”$count2.wav”;
print “$wav\n”;
system “mpg123 -w $wav \”$name\”";
$count2++;
}

Once you save the file you have to give it executable permissions with the command chmod u+x batch_conversion. To run the command you will issue (from the directory the new file is located) ./batch_conversion. Once you run the file you will have both the mp3 and the wav files located in the ~/Music directory.

Final Thoughts

Converting mp3 files to wav files for burning audio CDs is a simple process with mpg123. There are gui tools for this job but the command line tools make for much more flexible jobs.

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