.aac files

[Ross C]

What’s the best (or a good) way to convert .aac files to more usable formats e.g. .wav ? (Ideally without signing away life and soul to a conversion website.)

[Simon]

ffmpeg -i in.aac out.wav

[Ross C]

Perfect.
To do it to several files at once, I’ve found this:

for i in *.aac; do ffmpeg -i “$i” “${i%.*}.wav”; done

What’s going on in {i%.*} ? Particularly the % sign.
Edit: Got it, % seems to mean “delete the following suffix”.

[Ross C]

Seems to work fine without the quotes, is that bad in some way?

for i in *.aac; do ffmpeg -i $i ./test/${i%.aac}.wav; done

[Simon]

The quotes are there to handle files with spaces in their name.

[Author]

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