.m4a to .mp3 in linux?

[Old Pink]

What's the quickest/easiest method?

I know Amarok will played M4As, and so will mplayer, but I'm making MP3 CDs for my new car stereo, and it won't play anything but .mp3 or .wma, so I need to convert .m4a to .mp3.

[Old Pink]

Currently using:


mplayer -ao pcm:file=output.wav input.m4a && lame -h output.wav output.mp3 && rm output.wav

But rather not convert to .wav in between. Converting from wav to mp3 seems to take a while

[ron999]

Hi
You can use ffmpeg with a pipe, like this:-

ffmpeg -i input.m4a -f wav - | lame - foo.mp3

To speed things up you can use 'gogo-no-coda' instead of lame.
From here:-http://www.rarewares.org/debian/packages/unstable/index.php

Like this:-

ffmpeg -i input.m4a -f wav - | gogo stdin foo.mp3


:guitar:

[lexen]

I didn't have too much luck with that method, but what worked for me was a program called dir2ogg. If the file is in your home folder, just type
dir2ogg input.m4a into terminal and it will convert it to ogg, which you can convert to another format with audacity. I know it adds an extra step, but that was what worked for me.

[MacHaddock]

That lame #-o thing seems to work for me. Thanks!

[cascade9]

I didn't have too much luck with that method, but what worked for me was a program called dir2ogg. If the file is in your home folder, just type
dir2ogg input.m4a into terminal and it will convert it to ogg, which you can convert to another format with audacity. I know it adds an extra step, but that was what worked for me.

Gah! thats evil. Dont convert from lossy-> lossy-> lossy.

Bad enough doing a lossy-> lossy conversion, but if you have somethign that only suppots .mp3 then you havent really got a choice.

BTW, soundconverter (gnome) or soundkonverter (KDE) will do m4a->mp3 easy, from GUI.

http://soundconverter.berlios.de/

http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=29024

[Chronon]

You can always just burn the raw PCM to disk without any further degradation of the sound.