Comments on: IT Conversations Announcement for February 18, 2005

By: Mike L.

Mike L. — Wed, 22 Mar 2006 05:57:00 +0000

Convert mp3 -> m4b on Linux:
mpg123 -s input.mp3 | faac -b 80 -P -X -w -o output.m4b -

By: Tego

Tego — Sat, 19 Feb 2005 12:08:49 +0000

I personally use faac to encode AAC files under Linux which seems to work fine. Just naming them with a .m4b extension seems to be all that’s required to make them into a bookmarkable AAC file for iPods.

By: map

map — Sat, 19 Feb 2005 11:07:33 +0000

Addendum: A free AAC encoder for Linux is available from audiocoding.org. They even mention creating .m4b in their help.

By: map

map — Sat, 19 Feb 2005 10:36:09 +0000

Hi Doug.

Creating bookmarkable AAC files under Linux is as easy as renaming them from m4a to m4b. AFAIK there is no proprietary magic to bookmarkable AAC files, they do not differ one bit from their non-bookmarkable counterparts.

On a Mac there are two ways of creating a bookmarkable AAC file: Either set the right type/creator in the file’s HFS+ resource fork (“M4B ” instead of “M4A “) or rename the file to .m4b. In the latter case you will have to be sure that the file has no resource fork type set which would override the file extension. The “GetFileInfo” and “SetFile” tools in /Developer/Tools/ installed with the Developer Tools are a great help if you want to play with resource forks. As resource forks only live on HFS+ and can’t travel the internet without further packaging, this is probably irrelevant to your use case anyway…

I just tested both procedures with your announcement and it works great.