Copy MP3s to CD / USB key and reduce bitrate

Question

I want a quick way to be able to select a bunch of MP3s and burn them to CD (as MP3s on a data disk) for playback in the car, or to a usb key. Lots of apps including iTunes & Windows Media Player do this. However, a lot of my MP3s are at 320kbps, and I would rather transcode them down to 128kbps so I can fit more songs on a disk / usb stick, and the speakers in my car are rubbish quality anyway.

Is there an application somewhere that does this in one easy step? Windows Media Player will only let me choose a maximum bitrate if I burn the files as wma, and iTunes doesn't change bitrate at all.

Answer 1

MP3 Quality Modifier makes it really easy to change the bitrate of your mp3 music collection so that the filesize can be dramatically reduced. With this advantage it's possible to put more music on your mp3-player or just to save some disk space. Even advanced tasks are possible: Downsampling, changing the used channels and so on. With the included presets it's simpler than ever before to manage all those settings. Best of all is that - unlike other software - the ID3 tags (title, album pictures etc.) will be completely retained without any effort!

Main Features

* change mp3 quality with just a few clicks
* really easy and intuitive interface
* retain all ID3 tags with ease
* advanced options: detailed bitrate settings, sample frequency etc.
* quality comparison: compare created files with original ones
* multilingual: english, french, german, italian, portuguese, spanish
* portable: extremely small, just one executable, no installation
* free of charge!

Answer 2

Pretty sure Mediamonkey can do this.

Answer 3

If you're on Linux and like command-line solutions, then I could recommend Perl Audio Coverter. You can tell PAC to recursively convert a directory of any audio files and put the output files in another directory. This way you can simultaneously transcode your music collection to a lower bitrate and copy it to your player.