You are correct, it was impolite, as it was intended to be.
By repeatedly telling me to reformat a simple question, he came off as both arrogant and rude.
If he can not handle a little criticism in this area, then I will say it again, he should find other ways to spend his time, like refining his code to be more user friendly thus reducing the need for help with such a simple request.
As for the solution, I finally figured it out on my own with much trial and error and with your help about the formating of the ffmpeg command.
After I corrected the formating of the command, it was still not working.
Then I rearranged the lines in config.yaml to the following and finally got it working -
convert:
max_bitrate: 256
auto: yes
command: ffmpeg -i $source -y -b:a 256k $dest
extension: mp3
So somewhere in the way that beets is parsing that data, it is sending a corrupted command sequence, if the order of those lines is not correct.
If there is documentation pointing to how each pluggin’s line items should be arranged, I would appreciate the help in finding it.
But if I need to repeat this query seven times in seven different ways, then don’t bother.
Now I do apologize is the criticism has been received poorly, but I spent many years in technical support and as a technical trainer and I can tell you that telling folks you will not answer their question unless they repeatedly ask it in different ways will make people believe one of two things -
A. That you don’t know the answer to the question
B. That you are arrogant and condescending