Saturday, January 2, 2010

From m4a to mp3 !

From time to time, I use animoto to generate short videos. I like to use my iTunes music as sound track but always face conversion problems. iTunes stores the songs in an m4a format while animoto uses mp3 only.
After a while, I figure out a simple way to convert files from a format to an other. For this I used faad (an open source MPEG-4 and MPEG-2 AAC decoder) and lame the well known mp3 encoder.
Both install nicely on Mac OS.
A typical transcoding sequence is as follows:

faad -o sample.wav sample.m4a

lame -h -V 6 sample.wav sample.mp3

... but you might find additional and more useful combination reading the help.

Happy transcoding