Well sure always back up everything but this command will create new .opus files still leaving the original .m4a in the folder too, so even if it errors just delete the bad .opus files and try to resolve your ffmpeg codec issue before retrying the conversion or trying another method. Ffmpeg in my experience always converts with the “makes a new file with your file(s)” method, I’ve never had it do the “change the file destructively” method.
If you’re on linux try navigating to the folder in the terminal and running
for i in *.m4a; do ffmpeg -i "$i" "${i%.*}.opus"; done
before doing anything like that… back up the folder.
Well sure always back up everything but this command will create new .opus files still leaving the original .m4a in the folder too, so even if it errors just delete the bad .opus files and try to resolve your ffmpeg codec issue before retrying the conversion or trying another method. Ffmpeg in my experience always converts with the “makes a new file with your file(s)” method, I’ve never had it do the “change the file destructively” method.
It’ll also error out or prompt to overwrite an existing file unless a flag is passed that tells it to overwrite unattended.