Convert APE to MP3

I downloaded some music in .APE format. APE is a lossless format which is nice, but besides the fact each song is 30megs, iTunes also doesn’t support it. I didn’t particularly needed it to be lossless, so I search online trying to find the easiest way to convert APE files to MP3. I could’ve converted it to WAV using winamp and the encoded it in AAC with iTunes, but I didn’t particularily like that format. Plus that requried multiple steps. The easiest way apparently is a conjunction of foobar2000 and the Lame encoder. After installing foobar2000, copy the lame.exe and lame_enc.dll from the Lame compressed file to your foobar2000 directory (i.e. C:\Program Files\foobar2000). Drag and drop the files into foobar2000 and select the songs you want, right click and then convert. There are MANY different formats you can convert to such as APE, MP3, WAV, FLAC, and many more. LAME/MP3 also had several settings such as standard, medium, extreme, and insane. I didn’t bother trying standard, but medium is VBR of about 160kbps and extreme is 320kbps. I don’t even want to guess what insane is.

Just a really neat tool I thought I’d introduce you. Before, I did most of my audio conversions using Audio Catalyst, which was a useful tool, but didn’t have that many options. But it was rather simple and easy to use. foobar2000 has a somewhat steep learning curve, but once you do it a few times and get the hang of it, it becomes a breeze.