Audio – Good Free Audio Converter for OS X Lion

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Am trying to find a simple audio converter to convert various m4a, wma, mp3, and flac files to standard mp3 128KB VBR (for an ancient mp3 player with limited storage).

I'm probably only going to use this once and this is the one thing it needs to do however if it comes with additional features that'd be great too.

After looking into it a bit more (I've come from Windows recently so I know mp3 very well) I've discovered the benefits of m4a files over mp3. So I think I'm looking for a program that supports m4a output as well. Just wanted to throw that in there.

Also if it helps any I'm using a Late 2006 iMac, Core 2 Duo 2.0GHz, 4GB RAM, OS X 10.7.5.

Best Answer

Get ffmpeg via Homebrew, which can convert a lot of audio/video formats.

Converting your audio files then basically is done by running the following in Terminal

ffmpeg -i input.mp3 -b:a 128k output.mp3

ffmpeg is usually able to deduce input/output format from the file suffix.

To run this over a bunch of files, cd to the top folder containing the audio files and run

find . -type f -print0 | 
    xargs -0 -I '{}' bash -c 'f="{}"; ffmpeg -i "$f" -b:a "${f%.*}.128.mp3"'

This will create files ending in .128.mp3 for all audio files found (and throw a lot of ffmpeg errors for non-audio files in the same folders).

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