Converting files for iTunes

[Matthew Baxter-Reynolds]

Hi all,

This is a semi-useless response, apart from to give some confidence to you Arthur about whether this works.

I only use get_iplayer to download comedy of of R4 and R4 Extra.  Part of that process is running ffmpeg to get it to a point where it works in iTunes/on my iPhone, although I do have to manually change the MP3 tags.  This is, however, on Windows.

So - persevere - it does work!  :-)

Matt

On 24 Jul 2011, at 19:31, dinkypumpkin wrote:

> On 24/07/2011 18:04, Arthur Dent wrote:
>> I saw a posting from Jon Davies with a script "fixupm4a.sh" which seemed
>> to be just what I am looking for. Unfortunately it seems to rely on
>> mp4tags (which I have found comes with libmp4v2 on Fedora) and
>> mp4creator which is just not available (that I can find) on Fedora.
> 
> That script doesn't do the actual conversion of AAC files.  It was written to deal with hardware that couldn't play the M4A files written by ffmpeg available at the time.  The script works around the problem by forcing a re-optimisation of the file. See Jon's explanation in the message to which the script is attached. I think the problem may have been corrected in ffmpeg shortly after.
> 
> The basic ffmpeg command to convert a file is:
> 
> ffmpeg -i x.aac -vn -acodec copy -absf aac_adtstoasc -y x.m4a
> 
> I believe we established that ffmpeg from the 0.6 branch produces files that don't work with iTunes.  If that's what you have, you'll probably need to find a more recent version.  The latest release version (0.8) works OK.
> 
> BTW, if it should prove necessary, the mp4file utility that is part of the mp4v2 distribution can replace mp4creator, at least for optimisation purposes.  I'm not a Fedoran, so I'm not sure which RPM you would find it lurking in.
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> get_iplayer mailing list
> get_iplayer at lists.infradead.org
> http://lists.infradead.org/mailman/listinfo/get_iplayer

--------------------------------------------
Matthew Baxter-Reynolds
Director, AMX Software Ltd
Author of Cracking Native Cross-platform Mobile Apps Without the Kludge (http://www.multimobiledevelopment.com/)

...Follow me on Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/mbrit)
......Join me on LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/in/mbrit) 
.........Subscribe to my blog (http://www.mbr247.com/)

07799 138885
matt at amxmobile.com