I have a bunch of high quality electronic music (trance, dubstep, DnB, house, hardcore, hardstyle, electro, etc.) in WAV and FLAC. All of them have a samplerate of 44.1 kHz, 16-bit and stereo. I am wondering if you can recommend any good, yet FREE audio converter which can convert these files to a Lossy format.

And then here goes my second question: Which is the best Lossy audio format to convert to at HIGH BITRATES? Among the Lossy formats I am looking at so far are MP3 (plus the LAME encoder variant as well), AAC and OGG Vorbis. You can recommend other Lossy formats as well. I want to go up as high bitrates as allowed by the audio converter recommended above, since I got space to spare in my portable device (but not that much space for Loseless though).

My music are all electronic (trance, dubstep, DnB, house, hardcore, hardstyle, electro, etc.) as mentioned above with both energetic, dance-oriented ones and slow, relaxing ones. So, expect lots of complicated basses and complex high-end at varying BPM. I am just telling you guys the genre of music I am converting in case it helps. My loseless music varies from old ones from about the 1990s and 2000s to current new ones.

Thanks in advance!

You can use Foobar for converting.

Which format... depends, but in general LAME at V2 (variable bitrate, around 190kbps) is simple to use and should get you a good quality/size. You could also go with V0, which is the highest VBR, or with 320 CBR, but I doubt you'll actually hear an improvement the vast majority of the time.
I mean, to me the point of using lossy formats is saving space, so using the highest setting doesn't make sense if a lower setting sounds pretty much the same.

To use LAME in Foobar you need to download a bundle (from here) and point Foobar to lame.exe (it asks you once you start converting).


AAC will give you better quality at low bitrates (~128). Winamp includes one of the best AAC encoders, which you can also use with Foobar, but it takes a few extra steps to do that.