Program for batch encoding mp3's to different bitrate?

[superkdogg]

I have about 9k mp3s and I generally wanted to keep them at a high bitrate for good quality playback.

Now I'd like to compress those songs down to have another set of my collection that is all at 96 kbps or so for putting on my mp3 player to take on long bike rides, etc.

Is there a program that can load like 9,000 mp3's and re-encode them? Even if it only could do like 500 at a time, that would be fine.

Thanks for the suggestions.

 

[ttown]

LAME from the command line should do it

 

[mc866]

foobar2000 can batch encode

 

[MrChad]

dbPowerAmp

 

[QuixoticOne]

How much worse is the result when re-encoding say from 320kb/s to 224kb/s? Obviously it can be done and sounds "ok".. but I wonder how much worse that would be than re-transcoding from losless CD or FLAC straight to the desired bitrate.... Has anyone compared the quality in detail?