So I live in the past, whatever. Most of my music collection files are still mp3s, with a few oggs here and there. Jen had a free $25 gift card to iTunes, so I bought an album that Amazon nor my “russian connection” had on their list. I felt so dirty, but it had to be done. Anyway, if you want to convert m4a files to mp3 from the command line, run this:

for i in *.m4a; do faad -o - "$i" | lame - "${i%.m4a}.mp3"; done

Diggity done. Obviously, make sure faad and lame are installed. Re-tag and you are all set.

So, as we all know, I’ve used several tools to scrobble music to last.fm via the console. The problem was that it worked, well, sometimes. The old post.fm script would work great for hours, then just outright stop submitting tracks. Other times it would never work, and then submit 2 or 3 songs out of 10. I poked through the source a bit, but the extent of my perl knowledge consists of adding the line “#!/usr/bin/perl” to the top of the script. Seriously, that’s it. So thankfully Eric (who knows a LOT more then I do about perl) was poking around trying to figure it out as well. At any rate, we were both stuck, until he stumbled upon another script that works with cmus. The new script is called shell.fm-cmus and seems to be working MUCH better then the other. So far so good anyway…