PERSONAL 520

SPIRITUAL 416

LDS 312

BOOK OF MORMON 237

SCRIPTURES 154

STUDIO-JOURNEY 129

RELIGION 112

LINUX 79

COMPUTERS 65

LIFE 60

GENERAL CONFERENCE 46

GENTOO 39

MISCELLANEOUS 37

MUSIC 37

PROGRAMMING 33

CARS 29

MICROSOFT 23

FAMILY 23

AUDIO 21

I LOVE MY JOURNAL 18

FUN 15

CHILDREN 12

CURRENT EVENTS 10

NATURE'S WAY 10

VIDEO 9

DRM 9

CONEXM 7

BABBLINGS 7

PROVO CITY CENTER TEMPLE 6

FRIENDS 6

HEROD THE FINK 5

GAMES 5

COMPUTER HARDWARE 5

DRUMS 4

HAND OF GOD 3

ADVERSITY 3

KDENLIVE 3

AUDIO HARDWARE 3

GENERAL INSANITY 3

STUDIO 3

THANKS4GIVING 2

CATS 2

MY JOURNAL 1

POETRY 1

FOREVERGREEN 1

EVERYDAY THOUGHTS 1

GOSPEL 1

PARENTING 1

YOUTH CONFERENCE 1

CHURCH NOTES 1

POLITICS 1

Today, an audio file was sent to me in an email.  This audio was compressed and encoded using the aac codec for compression and wrapped in m4a.  In order to use it, I had to convert this file to a wav format.  Usually, I receive files in mp3, ogg, or flac file types, and use lame, oggdec, or flac to decode them back to wav.  With m4a, I didn't quite know how to proceed.

In cases like this, I usually turn to sox, which has been able to handle just about everything I throw at it.  This time, it threw an error, telling me "sox formats: no handler for detected file type `audio/mp4'".  Although I knew this probably meant something like, "Hey, I know this file type, but I'm not compiled correctly to handle it!  Help!", I didn't find an easy answer...  So I started looking elsewhere.

I happened upon a wonderful plugin of audacious called "FileWriter" - which comes default in gentoo installations of audacious.

I right-clicked on the main window, went to Preferences ->Audio -> Current output plugin -> FileWriter Plugin



Then loaded the m4a file into audacious, and played it.  About 3 seconds later, I had a nice new wav file contrived from the m4a file through audacious.

So, I thought I'd just let ya'll know how to convert from m4a to just about anything you need.