Using lame to create mp3s from wavs

Last modified on July 24, 2026 • 1 min read • 101 words Using Audacity  I converted one of the ripped WAVs into an MP3. However there was no possibility to batch convert WAV files. Thus I started to use lame from the command line. I created a shell script (encode.sh):while [ $ -ge 1 ]; do infn=$1 outfn="${infn%%.wav}.mp3" echo $outfn lame -v $infn $outfn shift 1done It does the batch converting:encode.sh *.wav The -v switch cause lame to encode using variable bitrate. -h would do fixed bitrate at 128, for other bitrates use e.g. -b 160. The -V 0 switch uses variable bitrate encoding with highest quality, while -V uses the lowest quality.