SoundConverter won't convert .wma to .mp3

MagicBanana:
>> Do you have the package "gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly" installed? <<

Yes, I have the latest version in the Trisquel 7 repos.

>> Here, SoundConverter often outputs a "GStreamer error" message that says "Could not open resource for writing"... but it does the job anyway! <<

This was the case for converting from m4a, but not for .wma. VLC can play the .wma files, but doesn't seem to be able to convert them.

VLC didn't work for transcoding .wma either. Segmentation fault.

M4A is a container which can also contain lossy formats such as AAC. If you need to batch convert, just copy all the M4A files into one folder and then use a for loop such as this (to convert M4A to FLAC):

for i in *.m4a; do ffmpeg -i "$i" "`basename "$i" .m4a`.flac"; done;

name at domain wrote:
> Convert all tour files can be quite long. Maybe a solution sould exist for
> converting cevral files in the same command but I don't know how. FFMpeg
> tutorials could tell you to do it.

I doubt ffmpeg would cover that, as that's a job for another program.

find FOLDER -type f -iname '*.m4a' -execdir ffmpeg -i "{}" "{}.flac" \;

This should work recursively, work with filenames that have spaces in their
pathnames, and leave you with copies of both M4A and FLAC files next to
each other. So be sure to run this only if you have plenty of free space.

You can delete the M4A files later (in a second find command) or as you go
(with "-delete" as an additional find argument). Shell for loops won't do
all these things, and they run the risk of filling the shell input limit.

You can rename the flac files from .m4a.flac to .flac with

find FOLDER -iname '*.m4a.flac' -execdir rename 's/\.m4a\.flac$/.flac/i'
"{}"

Replace FOLDER in either command with the path to the toplevel folder
containing the M4A files.

If you want to do more than one ffmpeg transcode at once, check out GNU
find's (-P option) or check out GNU parallel.

Thanks for all these suggestions, particularly the ones involving bash script, which I'm keen to learn more about.

>> I also recommand the libre format opus, available in SoundConverter who is much more better than the old mp3 for a good lossy format for your future convertions. <<

Format choice is ... well ... complicated. There are two considerations. Which is the best format for use on Trisquel and other libre distros? The obvious choices are FLAC or Opus, depending on how much I care about space, and how much the sounds quality matters for a particular album (not much point encoding a Dead Kennedys album in FLAC ;). BUT I might also want to play my music on another device I don't own (a TV or a car stereo with a USB port, or someone's handheld device), and there's no guarantee they will play FLAC or Opus. Also, I might want to share music I love with friends, and I tend to find they get confused when I give them anything other than MP3. For better or for worse, it is supported by the most hardware and software players, and thus it is the de facto standard for music.

I seriously considered storing two copies of all my music, one in FLAC/ Opus, one in MP3, to cover all use cases. But then my music collection takes up twice as much storage space, or I can only have half the number of albums. I have to decide. For now, I am going with MP3, because I can use it everywhere.