Automatically convert m4a to mp3?

Hello everyone,

I did a search, and did not find this particular question answered anywhere (and not within the past 5 years, so perhaps it's worth revisiting).

I have a situation in which I have an app I use to capture live audio in meetings. App works great, but only saves down to M4A. I'd like to have these files in MP3 format to be more shareable. Ideally, I'd like to have Hazel monitor a google drive folder (linked to my home server where Hazel is running), convert the file, rename and store it in another google drive folder where people could retrieve it. I have all the pieces except how I might be able to convert the file. It feels like this is something Hazel might be able to do, but I don't know how to do it. If anyone has some wisdom for me, I'm very happy to hear it. Thank you!

Hazel doesn't have anything built-in to do the conversion. That's much more specific and something you'll need other software for. Search the forums again as I'm pretty sure someone has used some sort of commandline tool to convert/manipulate audio files before. You'd have to work that into a script that Hazel runs.

Mr_Noodle wrote:Hazel doesn't have anything built-in to do the conversion. That's much more specific and something you'll need other software for.

Thank you for your response. I suppose I was overreaching Hazel's feature set. I don't know the first thing about scripting, so I can't write anything, so alas. I'll have a look around the forums to see if there was anything I missed. Perhaps someone's contrived a way to script handbrake into converting it or something similar.

Cheers!