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Useful built-in macOS command-line utilities

(weiyen.net)
700 points yen223 | 3 comments | 06 Nov 24 05:51 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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daneel_w ◴[06 Nov 24 16:42 UTC] No.42064988[source]▶
A couple more:

    afconvert(1) - an audio file format converter, which includes Apple's superior AAC codec from the Core Audio framework

    diskutil(8) - tons of tools for fixed and removable storage
Examples:

    afconvert in.wav -o out.m4a -q 127 -s 2 -b 160000 -f m4af -d 'aac '

    mb=300; diskutil eraseVolume APFS myramdisk `hdiutil attach -nomount ram://$((mb*2048))`
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1. derefr ◴[06 Nov 24 20:20 UTC] No.42068717[source]▶
Mostly I use XLD (https://tmkk.undo.jp/xld/index_e.html) for audio conversion (as I'm mostly converting from .BIN + .CUE to "iTunes Plus" AAC for uploading to iTunes Match); but my understanding is that under the covers it's mostly just using afconvert (or whatever the system-framework equivalent of it is.)

So if your needs are just "one audio file in, one audio file out, and let me tell you exactly what it should look like", then afconvert is probably what you want.

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2. seec ◴[06 Nov 24 20:26 UTC] No.42068800[source]▶
XLD is great. The best thing about it is the heavy parallelization if you have many cores to throw at the problem. You can convert mountains of albums very fast.

Love those type of OG Mac indie software.

3. daneel_w ◴[06 Nov 24 21:07 UTC] No.42069405[source]▶
Yes, iTunes also uses the same Core Audio framework. In fact, even iTunes on Windows uses the same code base through the Quicktime-for-Windows libraries it runs off of.

I prefer to encode with afconvert on the command line because it gives me a few more options for tweaking things, that I don't have access to in iTunes (or "Music" as it's called these days). Additionally, I use a simple shell script that handles all of it when for example ripping a whole CD.