{"id":3417,"date":"2025-08-05T10:10:15","date_gmt":"2025-08-05T18:10:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/owenmundy.com\/blog\/?p=3417"},"modified":"2025-08-05T10:26:45","modified_gmt":"2025-08-05T18:26:45","slug":"escape-from-music-subscription-services","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/owenmundy.com\/blog\/2025\/08\/escape-from-music-subscription-services\/","title":{"rendered":"Escape from music subscription services"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Like the rest of the world, I&#8217;ve moved on from CDs for music. However, since I&#8217;ve converted all my discs to digital format, and I&#8217;m not likely to pay for a smartphone that can hold 140 GB of audio, my music collection has only received attention while I&#8217;m bleeding MTB brakes in my garage. Since I recently upgraded my radio in my car to a Boss Carplay radio, which supports loading media from a thumb drive, I decided to try to revive my old tunes.<\/p>\n<p>The first issue is that while the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.crutchfield.com\/p_104BE7WX\/BOSS-Audio-Elite-BE7ACP-WX.html\" target=\"_blank\">Boss Radio BE7ACP.WX<\/a> (an upgrade from the original <a href=\"https:\/\/www.crutchfield.com\/p_104BE920WP\/BOSS-Audio-BE920WCPA.html\" target=\"_blank\">BE920WCPA<\/a> I purchased, and had to warranty once for the screen flashing on and off repeatedly, and another time for the screen information appearing completely upside down!) only supports MP3 files (and a thumb drive formatted with FAT32 with a max size of 32 GB!~). No problem, this can be done with FFMPEG&#8230;<\/p>\n<script src=\"https:\/\/gist.github.com\/855f33e7988df361c455120eb8428a8a.js\"><\/script><noscript><pre><code class=\"language-shell shell\"># convert M4A to MP3 - using variable bit rate https:\/\/superuser.com\/a\/704535\/132422\nffmpeg -i input.m4a -c:v copy -c:a libmp3lame -q:a 4 output.mp3<\/code><\/pre><\/noscript>\n<p>However, what if you have 140 GB of music, with a folder for each artist, and inside that, a folder for each album?<\/p>\n<p>Thus I share this project <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/omundy\/convert-music-library\" target=\"_blank\">github.com\/omundy\/convert-music-library<\/a>, which will convert an entire iTunes (or other) music library from .m4a to .mp3 (or .wav), maintaining the original directory structure (Artist\/Album\/Song). It still requires FFMPEG, and Node, but it may help someone else out there avoid locking themselves into a stupid subscription service. Enjoy!<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/owenmundy.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/finder.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/owenmundy.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/finder.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"img-fluid\"  \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Like the rest of the world, I&#8217;ve moved on from CDs for music. However, since I&#8217;ve converted all my discs to digital format, and I&#8217;m not likely to pay for a smartphone that can hold 140 GB of audio, my music collection has only received attention while I&#8217;m bleeding MTB brakes in my garage. Since [&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p><a class=\"btn btn-secondary understrap-read-more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/owenmundy.com\/blog\/2025\/08\/escape-from-music-subscription-services\/\">Read More&#8230;<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> from Escape from music subscription services<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[42,174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-code","category-hacks"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2ovQg-T7","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/owenmundy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/owenmundy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/owenmundy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/owenmundy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/owenmundy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3417"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/owenmundy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3417\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3426,"href":"https:\/\/owenmundy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3417\/revisions\/3426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/owenmundy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/owenmundy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/owenmundy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}