Terminal Terminology

[Reavus]

Hey guys,

Does anyone know what the the gnome mplayer is called in terminal? I type in "mplayer" or "gmplayer" and I get the video player but I am only after the audio application. I'm trying to write a bash script to convert *.m4a into *.wav.

Also, is there a good site or resource I can use to learn terminal and all its commands and how programs are refered to in terminal? A lot of programs on linux seem to rely on typing in command lines and i'm new to linux so its not yet my cup of tea but I'm learning.

Thanks for your help!

[moodywoody]

It's called totem .

[emorrp1]

do you mean mencoder? If you ever have problems with a terminal command, the man pages are a very useful reference:

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man mplayer

woodywoody: totem is another media player

[moodywoody]

woodywoody: totem is another media player

Wasn't really sure which one he meant.

Anyhow .. if you have the program in the menu, here's how to find out the command:

Right click on menu > choose Edit Menu > navigate to desired program > Click Properties > look under Command > Profit

[Reavus]

Sounds good!

But I've recently tried installing faad and lame to convert a m4a to wav then lame to encode the wav to mp3 and I cant seem to get the code to work. Ive googled different codes and I keep getting errors. Heres some of the code:

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#!/bin/bash

for i in *.m4a; do
	echo "Converting: ${i%.m4a}.mp3"
	faad -o - "$i" | lame - "${i%.m4a}.mp3"
done

And this is the error I get:

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Air.m4a file info:
RAW

Error: Channel coupling not yet implemented
Warning: unsupported audio format

What's the deal? I thought faad supported .m4a files?

[Kaye]

Well, you don't really need to pipe the output of faad to lame. It would be easier to say something along the lines of

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faad "${i}"
lame -V2 "${i%.*}.wav" "${i%.*}.mp3"

That is completely untested by the way, it's just a structure that should work. For example, you'd need to trim out spaces and rename files etc.

[Reavus]

Sorry, I'm afraid you are gonna have to clarify that code for me, I'll tell you know, I don't really understand this programming language so I can't really troubleshoot this myself.

[Kaye]

No problem. After going this far I figured I might as well just finish what I started. Here is a bash script for .m4a to .mp3 conversion. Just cd to the directory with the .m4a in them and run the script

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#!/bin/bash
#Author: Kaye

#Rename and convert files
for i in *.m4a; do
	hasSpaces=`echo "$i" | grep -i ' '`
	if [ -n "$hasSpaces" ]
	then
		echo Renaming $i
		i=mv "$i" `echo $i | tr ' ' '_'`;
	fi
	echo Converting $i
	echo `faad "$i"`
	echo `lame -V2 "${i%.*}.wav" "${i%.*}.mp3"`
done

#Clean up .m4a
for i in *.m4a; do
	rm $i
done

#Clean up .wav
for i in *.wav; do
	rm $i
done

Edit: Small improvement. It'll now remove the .m4a and .wav files for you after converting them to .mp3. If you want to keep the .wav or .m4a, just comment out the for loops at the bottom.

[Reavus]

Thanks for that Code Kaye, that was good. It turns out that I was doing something wrong with the file extensions. Apparently faad doesn't recognise .m4a files so I tried something else and changed the file extension to .aac and it worked! They are the same type of file it seems... im so noob

[Kaye]

Thanks for that Code Kaye, that was good. It turns out that I was doing something wrong with the file extensions. Apparently faad doesn't recognise .m4a files so I tried something else and changed the file extension to .aac and it worked! They are the same type of file it seems... im so noob

That's odd, faad should recognize m4a. It does for me. Well, either way, as long as it works that's all that matters