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How To Convert .m4a .mka .mp4 to .mp3 (And other formats) With FLV Crunch On The Mac OS

December 19, 2012

I like listening to audio books and presentations while I’m driving, but the problem is, most of the files that I find online are usually in the form of a video. That makes it unplayable on my music player. I skipped over a few files before I finally prodded myself to go search for a solution on the Mac, and I was pleasantly surprised with what I found.

FLV Crunch is a free software that’s made by this anonymous programmer, and is an EXCELLENT file converter or media converter for the Mac. I can’t say it enough: it’s fast, it’s flexible, and it’s completely free. And unlike what its name suggests, FLV Crunch actually works with a lot of other files, other than the FLV format. I used FLV crunch to convert a couple of .m4a files to .mp3, several .flv files to .mp3 files also, and even converted a .mkv presentation to a .mp3 file. It’s awesome. If you ever find the need to convert any media files on the Mac, you should check out FLV Crunch first.

Here’s what I found of the programmer:

Programming is my hobby. I am not a company or anything like that. I am just one person trying to better the Macintosh experience. I’m not very good with web page development so forgive me if my site isn’t very good.

I was interested in digital video since the late 90’s when Quicktime starting providing channels. Any tiny video clip that could play on a computer was really cool to me then. A couple of years later I was introduced to a site called AnimeMusicVideos.org. It had a lot of cool music videos that I loved to download. It was all good until I would find a video I wanted, but couldn’t watch it because it was a WMV or the resolution was too high for computer to handle. It was around 2003 when I encountered a AVI file I was desperate to convert. I went to the web for a some kind of software to make the file playable, but the only thing I could find needed Mac OS 10.3 in order to run. I was out of luck then with my computer running only Mac OS 10.1. I became so desperate that I turned to this open source program that could convert my file into an mpeg 1 file. The problem with this program was it was a Windows program. I actually tried this program out in Virtual PC but it was horribly slow. After three hours of converting and not even reaching the half way mark, I decided it was time to give up. In 2005 I decided it was time to try to make my own converter application. My research was slow until I encountered a program called FFmpeg. It was a command line program that wasn’t user friendly, but did work. I was able to convert a lot of files with it. It later occurred to me that I could make a GUI for this program that would be user friendly. So in 2008 I started work on a project I called Flv to MPEG. This program was suppose to be a Mac OS 9 application, but I couldn’t successfully build FFmpeg on Mac OS 9. So a moved my target OS to Mac OS X. Support for the flv format was because it was the format used on YouTube. During development the scope of the project was increased to support a lot of different formats. The name was also changed to Flv Crunch. By February 2009 the program was finished and released to the web.

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