This is the fastest way to create an ipod-playable m4b file. The “drawback” is that the codec is proprietary but this is how you’d put it, it is free and the most efficient in quality and encoding.
[Solved] Fast High Quality Encoding of ape Format into Lame mp3 or Nero m4a on Linux
The lossless2lossy.sh script does not give enough good functions to split *.ape files into tracks. The below solves the problem in Fedora 12.
Convert Single APE File to m4a Ipod-Playable Files on Linux
Download the latest Nero Aac MPEG4 Encoder/Decoder binary from here. Unpack, copy neroAacDec, neroAacEnc and neroAacTag to ~/bin. The below is confirmed for Fedora 9, Fedora 10 (x86_64).
Convert APE, FLAC, Wavpack, Ogg, MP3 Encoded Files Under Linux
The below should work out for x86_64 platform too.