converting m4a to wma or mp3

[lysander]

how can i convert my music files which are m4a to wma or mp3

[fguy64]

check out an open source program called Audacity. I haven't tried to do what you ask, but Audacity is highly regarded program, it's definitely worth a try. Let us know how it goes.

Audacity: Free Audio Editor and Recorder

[D-cat]

Audacity might work as long as you don't have the crippled version that comes with some distros.

VLC is able to transcode, but I often get buggy output from it. Your best bet is probably to use a two stage process.

I use XMMS with the diskwriter, but there are other options as well (script using MPlayer). The idea is to expand the file into WAV format. This is pretty universal. Then use LAME to recompress it into MP3 format. I find that it's very much worth it to use the -h switch.

Also, some hardware player puke on vbr, my lame line in the above script would be

lame -b 128 -h "$fifo" "$dest"

[thomas.hedden]

I assume that you got the M4A files from iTunes. I think that iTunes now allows MP3s to be created from purchased music. In any case, if you create a CD, you can re-import any M4A files back into iTunes or (probably) any other music player as MP3s.