One of my favourite podcasts, Chub Creek ... / 2013-01-22

One of my favourite podcasts, Chub Creek switched to m4a audio files and those don't play on my iRiver ifp-795 mp3 player which means I don't get around to listening to them. Open source and some scripting to the rescue can fix this, I found some good hints at .m4a to .mp3 - Linuxquestions wiki and tried them.

koos@thompson:/scratch/mp3/podcast$ faad CC125.m4a 
..
CC125.m4a file info:

LC AAC  2934.618 secs, 2 ch, 44100 Hz

writer: Dave
title: CC125
artist: Dave
album: Chub Creek
tool: GarageBand 6.0.5
..
Decoding CC125.m4a took: 22.10 sec. 132.79x real-time.

And the next step is easy:

koos@thompson:/scratch/mp3/podcast$ lame -q 5 -b 128 --tt 'Chub Creek 125' --ta 'Dave' --tl 'Chub Creek' --add-id3v2 CC125.wav CC125.mp3
LAME 3.98.2 32bits (http://www.mp3dev.org/)
CPU features: MMX (ASM used), SSE (ASM used), SSE2
Using polyphase lowpass filter, transition band: 16538 Hz - 17071 Hz
Encoding CC125.wav to CC125.mp3
Encoding as 44.1 kHz j-stereo MPEG-1 Layer III (11x) 128 kbps qval=5
    Frame          |  CPU time/estim | REAL time/estim | play/CPU |    ETA 
112452/112452(100%)|    2:55/    2:55|    2:55/    2:55|   16.785x|    0:00 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
   kbps        LR    MS  %     long switch short %
  128.0        2.3  97.7        91.0   4.9   4.1
Writing LAME Tag...done
ReplayGain: -3.1dB

Good way to warm up the CPUs on the computer: I can see from the 'sensors' output on which core the calculations are running. With two cores, running two processes like these parallel works fine.