New Zealand Linux

Note: This tutorial is related to Ubuntu, however the clueful can use it easily enough

My kids old apple bit the dust the other day, so i thought ‘stuff buying another overpriced machine, their linux box can suffice’
They use gnome, and are familiar with rhythmbox – which i might add, works brilliantly with iPods.

So after a few days the kids started moaning that half the music had disappered. I double checked, and it turns out half it bought of iTunes was in m4a format which wasnt readable.
Solutions!
If you are not tied to rhythmbox then jump in and install xmms and xmms-faad packages.

If you are then this is the solution.
Install the Medibuntu sources
sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/`lsb_release -cs`.list --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list; sudo apt-get -q update; sudo apt-get --yes -q --allow-unauthenticated install medibuntu-keyring; sudo apt-get -q update


Then install the following packages
sudo apt-get install libavcodec-unstripped-52 libavdevice-unstripped-52 libavformat-unstripped-52 libavutil-unstripped-49 libpostproc-unstripped-51 libswscale-unstripped-0 ffmpeg

Now convert!
ffmpeg -i file.m4a -acodec libmp3lame file.mp3

Now you need to add the id3 tags,
id3tool -t "title of song" -a "album name" -r "Artist" file.mp3

Bingo!