I've searched the board and found a few bits and pieces, but some of the info is pretty old, so I'd like more recent opinions. I have some audio books that I ripped to mp3 format for use with my TDK Mojo. I just purchased an iPod and would like to have them in m4b so I can take advantage of the "bookmarking" in the iPod.

Obviously the best choice would be to re-rip the CDs to AAC, but the disks are in storage on the other side of the country, so that's not an immediate option. For me, I think transcoding as a stop-gap won't be that big of a quality hit.

I'm thinking to do the following using OSS tools on my OS X box:

lame --mp3input --decode filename.mp3 | faac - -o filename.m4a

That's a guess based on another thread that suggested the following for flac->aac:

flac -dc filename.flac | faac - -o filename.mp4

My remaining questions:
Endian-ness? Do I need to byte swap with "-x" on lame? All the mp3's were originally ripped on Windows using MusicMatch and other older tools (yes, old stuff ). According to what I have read on faac, it defaults to big-endian, so I believe I don't need to swap byte order.

Any suggestions for other options to faac? The faac web pages recommend using "-b 10 -c 3500" for speech, but that assumes ~10 kbps/mono input files, and mine are all at least 32kbps/stereo mp3s.

I'll be working on building a shell script for the process to deal with the tagging as well. It seems like a lot of work for stuff that I've mostly listened to already, but I read/listen to books at least as much as music...and I need to work on my scripting skills anyway.

TIA--
=V=

Any particular reason you want to use faac as the encoder instead of iTunes? Because in iTunes you could just put the MP3's in the library then Convert to AAC. Converts tags and everything.

Oddly enough, it never occurred to me to select a song and right click in iTunes. I kept looking at the menus for the option to export to AAC or something...mreh. But, yeah, I decided to just do that instead, since lame->faac strips the tags.

I still have to deal with that ugly 3000 segment audiobook that has inconsistent tags though...le sigh.

Thanks--
=V=

p.s. nice avatar