Choosing good conversion options

If you want to convert audio files with soundKonverter you will be asked which codec and which options to use. soundKonverter provides two modes to set up conversion options, a "Simple" mode and a "Detailed" mode. You can switch between them by changing the tab in the conversion options window.

"Simple" mode

There are two kinds of codecs, lossy and lossless. Lossy codecs compress the audio data by removing parts of the audio stream that humans don't hear that good. The more data you remove the smaller the file size will be. You can define how much data should be removed by choosing the "Quality" from "Very low" to "Very high". The "Format" selection will then only contain lossy codecs.
In order to access special codecs like speex or 8svx you need to select "User defined".

Be aware that by encoding a file with a lossy codec you will always loose quality. This is especially true if you convert from one lossy format to another. (See generation loss.)

Lossless codecs don't remove data when compressing the audio stream. Therefor a conversion won't lower the quality. The downside is that the file size is big compared to lossy codecs. Choose "Lossless" as "Quality" and then the codec you want to use.

"Detailed" mode

In the "Detailed" tab you can choose the conversion options in greater detail. If you don't know what to do, just use the "Simple" mode.
Once you have chosen some conversion options you can save them for later as a profile using the save button on the lower right. You can access your saved profiles with either the load button on the lower right in the "Detailed" tab or the "Quality" selection in the "Simple" tab.

Output directory

There are four modes for the output directory:

• By meta data:
  Name all converted files according to the specified pattern.
  You can enter the output path for all files using wild-cards. Those are short strings that will be replaced by meta-data read from the audio files. All available wild-cards are listed below:
  %a - Artist
  %b - Album
  %c - Comment
  %d - Disc number
  %g - Genre
  %n - Track number
  %p - Composer
  %t - Title
  %y - Year
  %f - Original file name
  %s - Path to the source directory¹
  .
  You may parenthesize these wild-cards and surrounding characters with squared brackets ("[" and "]") so they will be ignored if the replacement value is empty.
  E.g.: /home/user/[%d - ]%a - %t will only then include the disc number in the output file name if it is greater than zero.
  In order to use squared brackets you will have to escape them with a backslash ("\[" and "\]").

• Source directory:
  Output all converted files into the same directory as the original files.

• Specify output directory:
  Output all converted files into the specified output directory.

• Copy directory structure:
  Copy the whole directory structure for all converted files.

If you enter a directory that does not exist, soundKonverter will automatically create it.

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1: Available as of version 2.1.0