opensuse v42.1
The only transcoder I found was “WinFF”. It did offer an AAC output from on MP3 input file. Unfortunately, the ffmpeg back-end installed from the package manager is not built with the FAAC library.
Is there another transcoder that actually outputs AAC format ( .m4a)?
almost everything uses ffmpeg and the ffmpeg from oss does not support patented formats for that you need to add and do a full vendor change to packman.
do you have packman?
did you do a full vendor change (if you don’t know what that means the answer is porobkly no) so tell us your repo’s
zypper lr -d
Yes, I have Packman as one of my repositories.
1 | PackMan | PackMan | Yes | (r ) Yes | Yes | 99 | rpm-md | http://mirror.karneval.cz/pub/linux/packman/suse/openSUSE_Leap_42.1/ |
How do I do a “full vendor change” for one application, ffmpeg?
you can’t do a full vendor change for one application because of dependencies, packman packages are build with patented codecs which might be free software but are not patent free that’s why they are not officially part of opensuse, to get aac encoding working you need to do (this will get all multimedia working not just aac audio)
zypper dup --from 1
zypper dup from 1
Okay, did that. A number of multimedia apps were changed, gstreamer and amarok for instance.
However, ffmpeg was not one of them. Attempting to convert an MP3 to AAC (still) yields this:
Unknown encoder 'libfaac'
Any other suggestions?
actually ffmpeg was changed, there are 3 aac encoding libraries that can be used in ffmpeg (I’m not sure why)
according to the ffmpeg devs the native aac encoder is superior to faac so maybe that’s why packman builds ffmpeg without linking to libfaac
so try using
ffmpeg -i input.wav -c:a aac -b:a 128k out.aac
https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/AAC
you can try asking the packman maintainers to rebuild ffmpeg with libfaac
http://packman.links2linux.org/help
I have used Sound Converter.
ffmpeg -i input.wav -c:a aac -b:a 128k out.aac
That works. 
I looked at the WinFF ffmpeg commands to output AAC; it used “-acodec libfaac.” When I change that to “-acodec aac”, the conversion proceeded normally. I guess I’ll mosey on over yonder to the WinFF list to see if there is a way to modify the default ffmpeg commands.
Or just use ffmpeg directly. Why not?
or if you prefer libfaac you can install it’s command line application faac
http://packman.links2linux.org/package/faac/671760
about WinFF you should be able to tweak the commands it passes to ffmpeg see this WinFF wiki
https://code.google.com/archive/p/winff/wikis/HowToMakePresets.wiki
Well, actually this is one of the main problems considering several “ffmpeg-GUIs”.
The main project ffmpeg is a quite rapidly moving target and most likely the GUIs are not really able to catch up.
After all, most (all?) of those GUI applications give you something to click on which under the hood puts all those clicks together, produces some ffmpeg command line and executes that.
If available encoders (or just even their naming schemes) change bam your GUI fails, so using the command line is most likely the better choice in a long term view.
However, although I am not really keen on recommending one of the GUIs available for ffmpeg, there is at least one I know, which gives you an additional feature which might come in handy, maybe there are also others who do this.
The gui “ffmpegyag” (available from Packman) has the functionality “Save Script”.
As you may already have guessed, this function saves the ffmpeg command line it will execute when choosing “Encode” and I sometimes use this to get a starting point for more complex tasks.
As for WinFF, the last time I used that program it was possible to override the available “profiles” I think it was called, by copying them from their standard location (somewhere in /usr/share) to your $HOME (AFAIR $HOME/.winff, see documentation for clarification) and modify them accordingly.
AK
WinFF allows their “presets” to be modified, copied and modified, or create whole new ones. It does the job of converting the MP3s to M4As without further messing about.
Thanks for all the help and pointers.
soundkonverter from the KDE Extra repo has a simple gui that will convert to multiple audio formats including aac and newer formats like opus