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Convert Single APE File to m4a Ipod-Playable Files on Linux

Download the latest Nero Aac MPEG4 Encoder/Decoder binary from here. Unpack, copy neroAacDec, neroAacEnc and neroAacTag to ~/bin.

The below is confirmed for Fedora 9, Fedora 10 (x86_64).

mkdir -p ~/bin
mkdir neroaac
mv NeroDigitalAudio.zip neroaac/
unzip neroaac/NeroDigitalAudio.zip
mv neroaac/linux/* ~/bin/
rm -rf neroaac

(If you are crazy about the quality like I am, use neroAacEnc -q .75 -if “$j” -of “$i” which is close to mp3’s 320 kbps quality.)

You will need mac compiled and installed as described in [intlink id=”convert-ape-flac-wavpack-ogg-mp3-encoded-files-under-linux” type=”post”]one of my previous posts[/intlink].

Update: mac is available through yum

sudo yum -y install mac

Install some necessary stuff.

sudo yum -y install cuetools shntool easytag

Allthe rest is pretty simple (if someone asks me I would upload a script I use). The only drawback of this approach is that the id3 tags cannot be written automatically (it seems there is still no way to do, looking in Google at the present moment does not bring any sane result, cuetag works only with flac, ogg and mp3 files, but I am sure it can be overridden).

Convert a single .ape file to a bunch of .wav-s.

mac [input_file.ape] temfile.wav -d

The above will create a bunch of split-track01.wav … split-trackNN.wav files. Now encode to m4a:

for j in split-track*.wav ; \
do  \
i="${j%.*}"".m4a" \
neroAacEnc -if "$j" -of "$i" ;\
done;

You can use a great tool, easytag, to put in order the id3 tags.

To be continued on how to create m4b audio books for ipod.

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