This is the fastest way to create an ipod-playable m4b file. The “drawback” is that the codec is proprietary but this is how you’d put it, it is free and the most efficient in quality and encoding.
The lossless2lossy.sh script does not give enough good functions to split *.ape files into tracks. The below solves the problem in Fedora 12.
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).
The below should work out for x86_64 platform too.