There are a couple of ways that we could go about this. First, I put the code for this program up at code.google.com/p/converttomp3/. If you’d like, I could add you as a project owner and you could check changes in with SVN. If you’re not up for that, it’s no problem. I’ll get your changes checked in to the trunk as soon as I get a spare moment. What do you think?

However, I’ve noticed a few problems prevented me from using it. You set the mp3 encoding to a low-ish 192cbr, and while that’s good for 128kbps AAC, most iTunes plus files are now 256kbps. Also, I noticed you don’t provide for a few essential iTunes tags like: total number of tracks, disk numbers, Composer, Album Artist, and the “part of a compilation” flag. Those last two are specially important so soundtrack albums show grouped on the player and not as split tracks under each artist. Since I’ve gathered here you are a busy man, I took the liberty of changing the script myself and adding support for those tags and mapping them to their mp3 counterparts.

As a bonus I’ve fixed a small issue where you mapped the Year tag to the long deprecated TYER frame, which is invalid under id3v2.4, and although still works in some software players, is very frowned upon. Oh, and I’ve put artwork support too, so if there’s album covers in the m4a files they’ll get also passed along to the mp3s (at the cost of adding ImageMagick dependency to the script). Nothing a ’sudo apt-get install imagemagick’ won’t do for most people.

Check it out, I’ve put it on: http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/455517/ConvertToMP3.py

If you like any of those changes, you can use them however you see fit. I’ve tried to comment on the code wherever I made a change, but please clean up any programming bad practices, this is the first time I’ve ever wrote a line of python. Once again, thank you very much for this script.

Apparently, this conversion utility works for some people and not others due to issues with locales. If you have this problem, perhaps you could run “echo $LANG” on the command line and post the result. This could be a thorny problem to resolve, but I’m working on it.