Much as I love their products, Apple has still failed me in one important regard: they have not released iTunes for Linux. iTunes is, I think, my favorite application, and the one I miss the most now that I’m full-time Linux. I even dig the iTunes Music Store, and I’ve been known to purchase songs from it.

Yesterday I was browsing around the local pit of despair and saw the new Cake album “Pressure Chief.” I made a mental note to purchase it when I got home. I did so, then used hymn to clean the DRM filth off the .m4p files, leaving pure .m4a in their place. I copied the new files over to my Linux box and ran the following command:

for file in *.m4a ; do
    mplayer -vo null "$file" -ao pcm -aofile "$file.wav"
done

My installation of MPlayer can handle any file format QuickTime understands, and I ended up with a bunch of WAV files ready for conversion to MP3. I hope this helps anyone else who tries the same procedure.