I just bought an iriver player, and it doesnt play m4a, of which I have alot of files. How can I convert them to one of the following supported formats: mp3, ogg, wma, asf, and wav. I think ogg would be best, but I am not sure.
Looking for some free batch processing software here...
Thanks!!!

Frontah or thru foobar2000.

And write to iRiver asking AAC support.
I just did it 2 weeks ago

Thanks. I am setting up foobar2000 now. THere is a component for OGG, which is nice. But holy smokes is it SLOW. It is going to take forever to do all of my stuff.
I will explore 'frontah' now... can you give me a little hint?? i am basically googling it.
Any other suggestions?

OK. I have it all in OGG, but none of the ID3 tags came through, so it doesnt come up on the artist or genre searches, only if I use the straight file system. Any suggestions for fixing this?

Foobar will carry over id3-tags.
Perhaps frontah does not support reading m4a/mp4 tags yet.

Foobar should not be any slower than any other transcoder.


edit: you say id3-tags. m4a/mp4 does not use id3 tags but its own format.

Is there some way of extracting the song information from m4a and attaching it to the new ogg files? Or maybe just generating new song info automatically?
Again, thank you very much. The foobar2000 is a nice tool!

if you are talking about whole albums, you can use freedb's search caps in gfoobar to do it.

Thanks! I downloaded foo_freedb.dll into foobar2000 components and it works fine. A little clunky at times. But then again, I knew stuff like this would come up when I got the iriver rather than the ipod.

hmmm... it finds the album. I do 'apply tag', but it doesnt make it into the iriver DB. Does foobar2000 actually apply the tags to the files?

edit: foobar2000 does actually get the metadata from the m4a files (as seen in 'properties' in foobar2k). This is an iriver DB retardism that i need to solve.
When i use the apply tag, it works, but only sometimes...

It does, if file updates aren't blocked in the database preferences.

By the way, if you just want to copy tags from the m4a to the ogg file in foobar, put the originals right before the oggs in your playlist (make sure the order is the same) and use context menu > Masstagger > Copy tags.

OK. Thanks for the help. Foobar2k actually DOES copy the metadata from m4a to ogg. fb2k is easy to check this, just right click on the song and choose 'properties'. Oh, and between the masstagger and the foo_freedb stuff, I have it under control. The problem was the total POS Database software that came with the iriver. It is total junk! Thankfully there are alternatives, and everything loaded fine! It's iHptool and it is just so much better.
Thanks for helping out someone that is new to this kind of thing.