AIFF compatibility

[dbaker]

Preliminary info: I'm running Kubuntu 13.04 in VirtualBox on my iMac, which is running Mac OS 10.7.3.
1 gb ram and 20 gb storage are allocated to the VM; I have 4 gb ram and 500 gb storage in total.
Kubuntu is using KDE 4.10.5. Apparently my Grub version is "0.97-29ubuntu66" whatever that means.

AIFF audio files don't show up in the file browser in Decibel, so I tried to convert one in Sound Converter and got this error: GStreamer encountered a general stream error. The only program that will open AIFFs is Audacity. This means if I wanted to convert a whole lot of AIFFs to something Decibel can work with, I'd have to export them one by one from Audacity!

I assume I'm lacking some piece of software which is necessary for handling AIFFs, but when I googled 'linux aiff compatibility' nothing relevant came up.

[HalationEffect]

A better google search term is linux aiff converter.

I got a whole bunch of relevant results searching with that term, most of which reference the ffmpeg utility. Ffmpeg apparently can convert AIFF to MP3, FLAC, WAV, etc.

[dbaker]

apparently ffmpeg is deprecated...
*** THIS PROGRAM IS DEPRECATED ***
This program is only provided for compatibility and will be removed in a future release. Please use avconv instead.

I ran sudo apt-get install avconv, but it was unable to locate it.

[HalationEffect]

I believe that the package that provides avconv is called libav-tools.

BTW - the reason that ffmpeg is "deprecated" isn't the usual one of it no longer being developed or maintained... it's because of a very depressing civil war that's been raging for a couple of years between the ffmpeg devs and the libav devs, and the Debian / Ubuntu packager is on the libav side of the rift...

http://blog.pkh.me/p/13-the-ffmpeg-libav-situation.html

[dbaker]

oh dear....not one of those :\
Fortunately, I probably won't need it anway. In the past few hours I've gone through almost every audio player there is, and finally found one that fit the bill and was able to play aiffs, as well. Banshee is just awesome. Hopefully this means I won't even need to convert them, but I'll download libav anyway just in case.

EDIT: installed, but no idea how to run it now! Do you know the command?

[HalationEffect]

Alas, I've never used avconv myself, I've only ever used ffmpeg (and that so rarely that every time I've had to google for instructions on command line options for it).