Michael Wood

My mp3 player (which has just survived a trip round the washing machine) doesn’t support m4a files so I needed a way to mass convert the audio files. Also the plugin bmp-m4a (beep media player m4a plugin) doesn’t seem to be that stable for me.
Here is the shell script that I wrote to do this. It requires the two programs “faad” and “lame“. For ubuntu users these can be found in the repsitories/synaptics/apt
faad is an ACC decoder/player and lame is an MP3 encoder.

#!/bin/bash
#aac convert mp3
#Michael G D Wood (X3N)
for m4afile in *.m4a
do
echo —- Convert to wav —
echo faad “$m4afile” -o “$m4afile.wav”
faad “$m4afile” -o “$m4afile.wav”
echo — Encode to mp3 —
newfile=`echo $m4afile | sed -e ’s/.m4a//g’`
lame -h “$m4afile.wav” “$newfile.mp3″
echo — Removing wav files —
rm “$m4afile.wav” -f
done

Download: m4atomp3.sh  Simply run this script in the directory of m4a files. e.g. sh /downloaded/to/m4atomp3.sh
Two modifications that you might consider to make life easier:
1) Add “rm $m4afile” -f after the line “rm  “m4afile.wav” -f” [line 13] . This would remove the m4a version of the file, not having this results in you having 2 versions of your files one in mp3 format and one in m4a (the original)
2) Add a outer for loop, ie nest the original for loop. You could do this to make the script go into a set of directories and preform the convertor. e.g. for targetdirectory in $directorylist do cd $targetdirectory .. then the original for loop.
If you need any help/customisations/what ever with this leave me a comment.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 19th, 2006 at 2:32 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.