Both are command line utilities.
Ffmpeg powers virtually every audio / video web or desktop player that's ever existed, from youtube, netflix to vlc.
Pandoc is the ultimate converter tool to convert from and to html, docx, pptx, md, etc.
For pdf specifically, you can combine pandoc with poppler tools to convert a pdf to anything else. Pandoc can't convert from pdf, only to pdf.
Even if you have no experience with command lines utilities, I believe that for most of your use case asking chatgpt or any other llm how to convert x file format to y with x tool will give you a command you could just copy paste and 99% of the time it will work. The only thing you'd really need to understand is how to navigate between folders with cd.
With those 3 you probably won't need anything else as virtually all the converters online or offline use those under the hood to do the actual conversion.
Let me know if you need more details / help!
Free and open-source software is great, and their developers are too, but free and open-source shouldn't necessarily mean used by geeks alone. Why can't they just design their software to be more user-friendly? Yeah, you sure know a lot, write code for hours, don't rely on vibe coding tools, know how to install all required libraries and dependencies, and experiment with your very own scripts that basically do what other similar alternatives can do more conveniently, but not everyone can do all of those. So what? Well done, but what else do you wanna hear from me? Let us thank you for your contributions instead of bragging about your achievements and pretending to be the most exceptional hacker ever born! You don't wanna pay for software that you can use and even develop for free, you have privacy concerns, you don't want a handful of global corporations to dominate the whole world, you want everyone to access widely popular tools and methods for free, you advocate for equality and justice, but then you form your own elitist communities where only geeks can join and ordinary users are just treated as ignorant consumers who can't even run a simple Python script and print/display "Hello World" on the screen. Well, I shouldn't have to. Anyway, I wouldn't mind using the CLI, but I would prefer a GUI and arrow key/Tab navigation as a screen reader user. Most sighted users would definitely prefer that as well, given they rely on visual elements, and this is why they prioritize touch interfaces, visual effects and animations over accessibility concerns. We're no longer in the 80s. As for conversion tools, I used to use Format Factory and it handles several formats, but the installation process is not perfectly accessible as far as I remember, and the installer would bundle some additional stuff, possibly adware. It might even be abandonware. I use GoldWave for not only conversion but a number of other tasks that don't require Reaper and are even more complex and time-consuming if you perform them in Reaper. I shouldn't have to deal with projects and rendering if I just want to convert or trim a recording.
Comments
Use pandoc + ffmpeg for audio / video stuff
Both are command line utilities.
Ffmpeg powers virtually every audio / video web or desktop player that's ever existed, from youtube, netflix to vlc.
Pandoc is the ultimate converter tool to convert from and to html, docx, pptx, md, etc.
For pdf specifically, you can combine pandoc with poppler tools to convert a pdf to anything else. Pandoc can't convert from pdf, only to pdf.
Even if you have no experience with command lines utilities, I believe that for most of your use case asking chatgpt or any other llm how to convert x file format to y with x tool will give you a command you could just copy paste and 99% of the time it will work. The only thing you'd really need to understand is how to navigate between folders with cd.
With those 3 you probably won't need anything else as virtually all the converters online or offline use those under the hood to do the actual conversion.
Let me know if you need more details / help!
GUI
Free and open-source software is great, and their developers are too, but free and open-source shouldn't necessarily mean used by geeks alone. Why can't they just design their software to be more user-friendly? Yeah, you sure know a lot, write code for hours, don't rely on vibe coding tools, know how to install all required libraries and dependencies, and experiment with your very own scripts that basically do what other similar alternatives can do more conveniently, but not everyone can do all of those. So what? Well done, but what else do you wanna hear from me? Let us thank you for your contributions instead of bragging about your achievements and pretending to be the most exceptional hacker ever born! You don't wanna pay for software that you can use and even develop for free, you have privacy concerns, you don't want a handful of global corporations to dominate the whole world, you want everyone to access widely popular tools and methods for free, you advocate for equality and justice, but then you form your own elitist communities where only geeks can join and ordinary users are just treated as ignorant consumers who can't even run a simple Python script and print/display "Hello World" on the screen. Well, I shouldn't have to. Anyway, I wouldn't mind using the CLI, but I would prefer a GUI and arrow key/Tab navigation as a screen reader user. Most sighted users would definitely prefer that as well, given they rely on visual elements, and this is why they prioritize touch interfaces, visual effects and animations over accessibility concerns. We're no longer in the 80s. As for conversion tools, I used to use Format Factory and it handles several formats, but the installation process is not perfectly accessible as far as I remember, and the installer would bundle some additional stuff, possibly adware. It might even be abandonware. I use GoldWave for not only conversion but a number of other tasks that don't require Reaper and are even more complex and time-consuming if you perform them in Reaper. I shouldn't have to deal with projects and rendering if I just want to convert or trim a recording.