is there any way to losslessly convert a whole recursive file directory of .m4a files to .opus

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i have a bunch of .m4a files in one folder, 1000s. can i automate their conversion somehow?

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No as both are lossy codecs you will always lose quality doing so. You can do it with ffmpeg.

parallel ffmpeg -i {} {.}.opus ::: *.m4a

You may want to tweak parameters for bitrate, etc. But this is not needed at all, as AAC had patents that are now expired.

If you get .flac, .wav or similar lossless music, you should encode that with opus. But lossy to lossy makes nearly no sense (apart from specific players not supporting them)

GNU Parallel works well for this kind of thing. A lot of audio stuff is single threaded, so unlike video transcoding running multiple conversions simultaneously is a useful thing to do. The command is simpler, too:

parallel ffmpeg -i {} {.}.opus ::: *.m4a

If you get .flac, .wav or similar lossless music, you should could encode that with opus.

Fixed.

Unless you have a strong stance against people storing lossless files of their music? But I don't think that's quite what you meant :)

"If you get .flac, .wav or similar lossless music, you should encode that with opus."

I am looking forward to similarly useful discussions XD

it's my music and i dont like proprietary formats