How to convert WMA to MP3 using VLC instead of MPlayer

I’ve been looking into this for a few days now, frustrated with all the scripts, recipes, methods posted on forums and blogs. It seems that nobody knows how to do this properly! So if you have a music library with many wma files in it, and you want to convert them to mp3, you’ve found the right post.

Method: a bash script will be created for the conversion – this script will convert each individual file one after another, using the VLC media player.

You’ll need:
1-VLC media player (sudo apt-get install vlc [enable extra repos for this]);
2-ffmpeg library (sudo apt-get install ffmpeg [enable extra repos for this]);

Steps:

1-open a terminal command-line, run the command below to generate a script which will convert your files

find -L /path/to/your/mp3/library -iname *.wma -exec echo 'vlc -v  "{}" --sout '\'#transcode{acodec=mp3}:standard\{access=file,dst=\"{}.mp3\",mux=ffmpeg\}\''' \; >> batch_wma2mp3.sh; chmod u+x batch_wma2mp3.sh;

2-check the script for apostrophes or single quotes or double quotes in the names of your files.

gedit batch_wma2mp3.sh

3-run the script with this:

./batch_wma2mp3.sh

NB.: If you have DRM protected files, there will be no way to decrypt them with VLC neither with Mplayer. I didn’t add the vlc://quit at the end of each command call coz sometimes it will mess up the playlist and just quit without converting the song, that’s why you have to close VLC manually for each song.