Friday 4 September 2020

Ripping CDs to AAC (M4A) files

Since MP3 is officially obsolete and AAC is a better format, I have decided to rerip all the CDs I own to this format.

This is quite easy with k3b,  you just have to add another external encoder specification. I got most of the info I needed from this blog post. One problem was ffmpeg was spitting out too many messages, so I did this:

ffmpeg -v 24 -i - -b:a 256k %f

The -v 24 is to suppress the normal informative output from ffmpeg which is quite verbose.

I also wanted to add tags, so after ripping I run this kid3-cli command in the directory:

kid3-cli -c 'select all' -c 'totag 3' -c save -c exit

This puts the tags implied by the filenames into the tags.

Don't forget to specify Write WAV Header as the original blog post says.