How to convert .VOC to MP3 or other audio format

If the song is already in iTunes, it's easy to do it right within it. Go to the iTunes Preferences and choose "Import Settings" on the "General" page. You can set the desired output format here. Afterwards, select the songs you would like to convert and choose Advanced > Create XY Version, where XY is the file format you specified in the Import Settings. When iTunes has finished converting the files, you will have each track twice - you could use a smart playlist to filter the ones in the new format.

Bear in mind that converting from one lossy format to another lossy format will always result in a lower quality.

Automator 'hangs' when attempting to use LAME encoder unfortunately. It's also not efficient or advisable to try and use a multi-threaded process as an Automator Service. For tasks such as this it's best to either run a simple script or use an alternate method.

The script below will encode a 20Mb .wav to .mp3 in 3 seconds! (at the highest quality settings)

file="$1"

find . -name '*.wav' -maxdepth 1 -exec /usr/local/bin/lame -V 0 -q 0 '{}' \;

for file in *.mp3
do
  mv "$file" "${file/wav./}"
done

To install, download, then open terminal:

sudo install encode-mp3 /usr/local/bin

To use, navigate into a desired conversion folder and type:

encode-mp3

This will encode your .wav files to .mp3

Convert .wav to .mp3 | LAME Encoder Shell Script [md5: 72d4e24f14ea9139136900f2c4281a7f]

[original]

I just wrote a one-liner that will do this for you in Terminal, just cd to the directory of files you want to convert and enter:

find ./ -name "*.wav" -execdir lame -V 3 -q 0 {} \;