I have this M4B audio book that I wanted to convert to MP3 so I can play it on my Android phone. It has no DRM so at least it should be easier to convert.
M4B is just an AAC encoded file but meant for audio books instead of music. AAC is another highly compressed sound file format similar to MP3 but have better file compression than MP3 at the same quality.
I didn’t really want to buy a program to do this as I think that some of the well regarded freeware players/converters such as mplayer, ffmpeg and vlc should be able to do this (and I did find some instructions for ffmpeg). The few commercial programs that I did have only converted 3 hours out of 20.
But before I went with that, I remembered that AAC is not such an obscure format anymore and many players can play them now. So, I renamed the audio book by changing the file extension from M4B to AAC and voila! My Android phone was able to read the file without any issues. BTW, I was using the MortPlayer Audiobook app, which is an excellent podcast and audio book player for Android because it remembers my position in every audio file.
Tags: mplayer, audiobook, mp3, m4b, aac, vlc, ffmpeg, android, mortplayer
