Converting wav2mp3?

[Hart Larry]

Well, would you believe I have tried wavpack, lame, ecasound, and scripts, but 
no matter what, when I rip a stream to a wav-and-convert, all the mp3 has is 
white noise.  The wav file says little indian, when I run a file command on it.
So can some1 please provide the secret or a simple way to do this?
I am obviously wasting alot of space storing waves instead of mp3s.  Thanks so 
much in advance
Hart