M4a Audio In Linux

Fred

Fred

Moderator
I managed to get a friend of mine converted to Linux recently and installed Mandriva and lots of helpful extras... One thing he was concerned about was whether he would be able to play Itunes files in Linux and if he'd still be able to transfer them to his Ipod. Now I'm no huge fan of Mac or I-Anything, but I know that along with a few other media players advertise being able to send media to I-stuff (itunes, etc). So then, after the lengthy explanation I'll get to the reason for the thread: It seems that Itunes can (does?) download the audio files in m4a. I can't get Amarok or any other media players to recognize it. After I found some library (which I've forgotten) to download, I got xmms to play the files. Still no luck with amarok. I've downloaded another program called GTKpod onto his computer. When I try to add a file with the extension of m4a to the "playlist" I get this error message:
snapshot17xp.png
I've looked for an mp4v2 library through urpmi to no avail. Hopefully, I'm just an idiot and it is very simple. All the same, has anyone either found a successful way of converting m4a to mp3 or ogg or gotten m4a working in linux in some way shape or form? Any assistance would be appreciated.

--On a side note, I've googled a way to convert m4a to mp3 and got a couple hits for the same script. I tried the script, which is supposed to convert the files to mp3 and then delete the m4a, and all it did was delete the m4a. That's really no help ;)
 
Do a search in his distro's package manager (rpmdrake?) and search for anything containing 'aac'. Install them all.

As far as conversion, check out this site: http://gimpel.gi.funpic.de/Howtos/convert_aac/

...in the future I hope this will encourage your friend to use OGG instead of crappy, DRM-laden, proprietary formats. :(
 
Thanks for the help. I haven't ran the longer script on that page you linked to, but I ran the first, short one and it successfully converted a file to .wav. Now I'm going to try the longer script and then convert them all to mp3. I know what you mean about the pathetic and proprietary format... I told him a while back to just buy stuff off of allofmp3.com but we'll see if he'll start listening. Thanks a lot for the help AT, wish I would've found it without having to post, but oh well.


**EDIT**

Well, after messing with various other things and finding links on the page, I found a program called gnormalize. You can download it here or in Mandriva you can type in
Code: 
 urpmi gnormalize
and it'll sort out dependencies. I messed with it a bit and it seems to work perfectly. I hope my problem is able to help somebody else in the future.
 
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