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Any FREE M4a to wav Converters?

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Hi,

Trying to add a complete music score to my DVD project, but the music files are in M4a format, and I need to convert them to WAV first.
I would rather not have to spend any money on this, as I don't think I would have a use for the converter after this one project. Does anyone know of a 100% FREE converter that will not place an advert sound-tag on the audio files like AVS Audio Tools does?

FF

“First feel fear, then get angry. Then go with your life into the fight.” - Bill Mollison

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For Windows I presume?

MPlayer ought to do it. A command such as:
C:\>mplayer -ao pcm FILENAME.M4A
should produce a file with default name audiodump.wav

Or FFmpeg. These two sites offer precompiled Windows binaries (ffmpeg.exe)
I don't know its syntax offhand, but "ffmpeg --help" or "ffmpeg -?" ought to get you started.

Both MPlayer & FFmpeg include the same library for decoding, called libavcodec.

I used mplayer to decode Neil S. Bulk's '77 Dolby Stereo capture before Belbucus released his.

However, in practice you must take into account the “fuckwit factor”. Just talk to Darth Mallwalker…
-Moth3r

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Thank you Darth!

I'll give it a go, and see if it works for me...


FF

“First feel fear, then get angry. Then go with your life into the fight.” - Bill Mollison

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For grins I decided to give ffmpeg.exe a try (from both websites linked above.)
Syntax is straightforward enough--something like this:
C:\>ffmpeg -i FILENAME.M4A FILENAME.WAV

Neil used Apple's lossless ALAC codec inside his M4A container, so as you'd expect with any lossless codec
ffmpeg's output WAV is identical to the one produced by mplayer in my tests.
I presume it's also possible to put another (lossy) codec inside an M4A container.
In that case ffmpeg & mplayer might not produce bit-for-bit identical outputs, although one hopes they would at least sound the same.

Originally posted by: FanFiltration
I don't think I would have a use for the converter after this one project.
Even if you don't do any more M4A conversions, here's another reason you might like to keep mplayer around:
"mplayer -speed 0.96" will play PAL movies at 24fps

However, in practice you must take into account the “fuckwit factor”. Just talk to Darth Mallwalker…
-Moth3r