Dear Paul, There is already support for the action of converting a wav file to 256 kbps m4a (aac files) from Finder under Mountain Lion and Lion, if you select/highlight your wav files and use VO-Shift-M to bring up the context menu, then select "Encode Selected Video Files". The "Encode Media" dialog window will have a "Setting:" pop up menu button that you should VO-Space on and change from "480p" to "Audio Only". (Under Lion this is under "Encode Selected Audio Files" under the Services menu.) If you want to make your own Service for converting to 256 kbps mp3 files, you can do so with Automator. Automator and AppleScript can be used to do the kind of operation you describe, where you select files and then select a menu option option to run an Automator service or workflow, or run an AppleScript, but these only work for applications where the developers have supplied the hooks to make them AppleScriptable, work with Automator, or support terminal command line usage so that they are shell scriptable.
What this means is that although it is very easy to create an Automator service to convert files you select in Finder to 256 kbps mp3 files with just a couple of Automator action steps, the basic assumption is that you want the results to appear in iTunes. You can even construct a folder action that will automatically put converted files into into the same directory folder or a separate one of your specification, but the converted mp3 files always get added to your iTunes library folder. This is fine if you use iTunes to organize your music (as I do), but I suspect this is not what you want. There isn't an action to automatically delete the tracks from iTunes. So it can be very easy to use Automator or AppleScripts within the context of the default supported actions, and this can work for a lot of applications on the Mac, but in general you can't use these with a random third party app. And it doesn't mean that it isn't doable (at least with AppleScripting) -- it just isn't going to be transparent or simple to implement. I don't have any recent detailed descriptions of Automator actions on this list, since I only usually take a look at this when questions come up. The last fairly detailed post I made about using Automator was on the mac-access list, which is also archived at the Mail Archive web site. HTH. Cheers, Esther On Jan 21, 12:15 am, Paul Erkens <[email protected]> wrote: > Dear listers, > > Often, I have a file that I want to perform a specific action on. For > example, this could be a stereo wave file, that I want to convert to a 256 > kilibit stereo mp3 file. Is there a way you can think of, that I can add a > new menu item to the vo shift mcontextmenu on a file, and then select from a > few user defined actions? Of course, the program in question must support > this way of getting commands, but I'd first like to know iffinderlets us do > this type of thing. So, I go to a wave file, I'd like to hit vo shift m, and > then select convert to mp3 256 with amadeus. Is such a mechanism available? > What about services? I have no idea yet how they work, nor how to use > automator. Please shed some light and knowledge on this if you have it. I'm > very curious because it could be a huge time saver. Thanks a lot in advance. > > Paul. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en.
