M4A, is an audio coding format developed by Apple Inc. for lossless data compression of digital music. Late 2011 Apple made the codec available open-source and royalty-free. In this article, I’ll explain how you can easily convert M4A audio files to MP3 files from the terminal window.
Open a Terminal window and go to the folder that is holding your M4A audio files. Now copy and paste the following command:
for f in *.m4a; do ffmpeg -i “$f” -acodec libmp3lame -ab 320k “${f%.m4a}.mp3”; done
For example:
$ cd Audio/Wanderen/Ready4Conversion
$ for f in *.m4a; do ffmpeg -i “$f” -acodec libmp3lame -ab 320k “${f%.m4a}.mp3”; done
The example above converts all M4A audio files in the folder “Audio/Wanderen/Ready4Conversion” to MP3 files.
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