wxLame: Free & Simple MP3 Encoder (Front-end)

“wxLame” is an audio encoding front-end that lets you convert few popular audio file types into the MP3 format. It’s a cross-platform tool that uses “LAME” (a command-line based MP3 encoder) and supports GNU/Linux (has “.deb” packages for Ubuntu/Debian) & Windows.

It supports reading 4 audio codecs formats (more below). The main window looks simple but feels like something is out of place (perhaps it could’ve helped, if showing the full file path on the main window was disabled?).

In MS Windows 7 however (could be because of the fancy “Aero desktop” and the smaller fonts used), the app looked pretty polished though. Anyway, on the bright side, it has a reasonable amount of features and quite easy to use ;-).

Few main features …

*. Change the audio bitrate.

*. Chose “average”, “variable” or “average” bitrates values.

*. Add “tags” info such as: CRC error detection, “copyright”, “non-original” etc.

*. Supported input file formats: MP3, WAV, AIFF & ape.

*. Change encoding algorithm settings (from low quality to highest quality based values).

*. Change the sampling rate 8/11/12/16/22/24/32/44/48 KHZ.

*. Add “High” & “Low” frequency filters.

*. Change the “mode”: mono, Dual-mono, simple and two stereo modes (Joint & Force).

If interested, please visit this “wxLame” project page and get it.

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Update (02/08/2013): If you use Ubuntu 12.10, then you can add the its newly added repository and can install ‘wxLame’ easily (including automatic updates). For that, please use the below commands.

sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:cfgnunes/ppa

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get -y install wxlame


It also holds ‘wxmp3gain’ (audio gaining tool) and ‘wxmp3val’ (a tool that fixes few MP3 related problems — header file corruptions, ‘garbage’ content etc). Once the repository is added, simply replace ‘wxlame‘ with their names to install them.

A special thanks goes to ‘Cristiano’ for creating this repository.

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If you use Ubuntu, then download the “.deb” file (has both 32/64-bit versions) and once the download completes, double click on it and Ubuntu Software Center should install it for you. It worked in Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot without any issues and since it has small number of dependencies, it should work on older versions too (I think).

As a final word, if “Christiano” (the developer) could expand its input file format support (mainly), then “wxLame” can be a pretty powerful utility as it has a reasonable amount of features implemented already :). Other than that, for a simple audio encoder, it looks good.