How do I programmatically convert mp3 to an itunes-playable aac/m4a file?

Question

I\'ve been looking for a way to convert an mp3 to aac programmatically or via the command line with no luck. Ideally, I\'d have a snippet of code that I could call from my

Answer 1

I've had good luck using mplayer (which I believe uses ffmpeg...) and lame. To the point that I've wrapped it up in a script:

#!/bin/sh

TARGET=$1

BASE=`basename "${TARGET}"`
echo TARGET: "${TARGET}"
echo BASE:   "${BASE}" .m4a

# Warning! Race condition vulnerability here! Should use a mktemp
# variant or something...
mkfifo encode
mplayer -quiet -ao pcm -aofile encode "${TARGET}" &
lame --silent encode "${BASE}".mp3
rm encode

Sorry for the security issues, I banged this out on the train one day...

My mplayer and lame come from fink