Quickie: Bulk WMA conversion to MP3 using avconv.

I was recently playing around with MacOSX’s built-in dictation tools and had to convert a bunch of WMA files to a format that could be opened using Audacity.

The following one-liner uses a for loop to quickly convert each .WMA in the current working directory to a .MP3 file using avconv. If your using an older package repository avconv could be substituted for ffmpeg.

for FILE in *.WMA;
 do FILE=`echo $FILE | sed 's/.WMA//'`;
  avconv -i $FILE.WMA -acodec libmp3lame -ab 128k $FILE.mp3 ;
done

Remember: File names, including extensions, are case sensitive in Linux/Unix. Only files ending in “.WMA” will be iterated.