No, normally a .m4a file is a mpeg-4 file, only its audio track (that's what m4a comes from), while .mp3 is either mpeg-1 layer 3 or (lower bitrates) mpeg-2 layer 3. (aac = Advanced Audio Coding), the preferred coding by Apple. PS: as .mp3 already was so common they skipped mpeg-3 encoding in the standard.
To split an audio file accompanied by a CUE sheet into tracks in .wav format, use the shnsplit command: $ shnsplit -f file.cue file.wav. To split .bin file with CUE sheet into tracks in .wav format: $ bchunk -v -w file.bin file.cue out. Format for output file names can be specified with the -t option ( %p for performer, %a for album, %t for
We piped the output of cdparanoia to the lame application which is used to create mp3 audio files. Since mp3 is a lossy format, we used the -b option of the latter to specify a fixed bitrate of 320kbps and, again, the - symbol to instruct the application to read from its standard input; finally, we provided the name of the output file, just
For any version. I found a neat way to do this with mplayer. This script will rename the files to remove all blank spaces in the names of the files and will recursively convert all .wma files in the current directory to .mp3: