Automatic conversion of aac to m4a

[Nick Ludlam]

On 16 Mar 2011, at 08:55, MCCG wrote:

> Christopher Woods (CustomMade) wrote:
>>> Andy Bircumshaw wrote:
>>>    
>>>> On 14/3/2011, at 3:24pm, Richard Hughes wrote:
>>>>  I would imagine that the vast majority of players should be       
>>> able to play AAC these days, if it's formatted correctly.
>>>            
>>> I would be very surprised if that were true....
>>> None of mine will play aac - new LG TV, Humax Freesat, Car stereo (Ford), bedroom stereo (Hitachi), 2nd car stereo (can't remember the brand!).
>>>    
>> 
>> Odd that neither the LG telly nor the Humax Freesat box will play AAC files,
>> both require AAC support as part of the DVB-S2 and DVB-T2 specs. My boss has
>> a Humax Freesat HD receiver, I could try some AAC files on a USB stick if
>> you want to verify software support. How are you presenting the AAC files to
>> the devices, as .aac or .mp4 / .m4a files?
>>  
> 
> I confirmed last night with a few aac files on a USB stick.
> None of them will even list .aac files in their "music" browser.
> Only mp3 file show up.
> Ironic isn't it, because, as you say, the LG TV (50PK590) and the Humax HDR have an AAC decoder built in for DVB-S/T2.
> 
> The LG TV has a good iPlayer app that plays all the iPlayer content direct, including HD video with aac audio & radio.
> mp4 video files (from get_iplayer) play OK - haven't tried an audio only one.
> 
> The Humax iPlayer app is a bit crippled (plays SD TV only), but I suspect that has aac audio too.
> It does not play external video files without using an "AV2HDR" tool to convert them to it's own format.
> 
> But, as I have said, I am not worried, because I can easily convert to mp3 - just pointing out that many devices will not play aac files.


It might be an interesting experiment to try playing back an m4a audio file by renaming the suffix to mp4, but I completely agree about  lack of players for raw aac. It's not a very useful format for end users.


Nick