So, in the beginning, there was light. And then, there was music! The audio support of the W300i are actually better than the video one, and we can skip straight through MP3 to go to AAC (but only LC, that’s too bad). For a podcast 32kbps are quite enough, but for music 64kbps is recommended. The problem is that I manly use it in the gym, and I don’t want to mess around with the volume, so I need to even out the volume of the tracks. You can use Wavegain, but I find that The Levelator is so much better. They only work on WAV files, so we first convert to WAV, normalize, and convert back to AAC (actually MP4, which we use as container for AAC encoded files) using Nero Digital Audio. I created a small convert.bat file to use:
:main
if not "%~f1"=="" goto convert
pause
exit
:convert
d:\multimedia\lame.exe --decode "%~f1" "%~dpn1_temp.wav"
d:\multimedia\level.exe "%~dpn1_temp.wav" "%~dpn1_temp.wav"
d:\multimedia\neroaacenc_sse2.exe -2pass -lc -br 64000 -if "%~dpn1_temp.wav" -of "%~dpn1.mp4"
del "%~dpn1_temp.wav"
shift
goto main
which you can use as such convert.bat track.mp3 or (and that’s the preferred way) just drag and drop a bunch of mp3 on the file (but not too many, because windows is picky) and it goes through them one by one. Notes: level.exe is The Levelator, but you’ll have to look for it in your My Documents directory after you go through the weird Java install; if you’re not converting MP3, lame decoding won’t do much for you, so you could use ffmpeg instead like so:
d:\multimedia\ffmpeg.exe -i "%~f1" "%~dpn1_temp.wav"