mplayer m4a to mp3 conversion

[ac3raven]

or any conversion I suppose. My question is simple: How do I use this command:

mplayer -ao pcm *.m4a -ao pcm:file="*.mp3"

to convert whole directories and place the converted tracks into another directory. The way it's listed above it will convert all songs with a .mp4 extension into a single file with a .mp3 extension. Which of course, is not what I want, but I know of no other way to use this command.

[scottro]

Maybe a for loop? Some like for i in *.m4a;do

song=${i%.m4a}
mplayer -ao pcm $song.m4a -ao pcm:file=$song.mp3

(Done in a hurry and untested, DON'T TRY THIS WITHOUT TESTING IT.!!!)

Even if the syntax is off there, the idea is Ok, I think, go through the m4a files, make a variable that removes the suffix, run the mplayer commands on $VARIABLE.m4a to output to an mp3 file.

Hopefully, a more skilled scripter will give you something better.