Getting radio into iTunes and onto an iPhone

[Shevek]

On 23 March 2011 23:06,  <geoff.getiplayer_list at alphaworks.co.uk> wrote:
> I'm trying to get BBC radio programmes into iTunes and onto my iPhone under
> Windows XP. Now that we can't get MP3s I'm a little confused...
>
> While I understand I can use FFMPEG to convert into MP3s the AACs that are
> downloaded, from what I've gleaned from this list I'm not sure this is the
> best solution. As I understand it, converting from AAC to MP3 is transcoding
> which is lossy and time-consuming. Can someone explain to me what these AAC
> files are and why iTunes won't recognise them (it fails silently)? I get the
> impression iTunes should handle AAC but is this an issue of containers /
> codecs?
>
> I tried the advice given in
> http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/get_iplayer/2011-March/000928.html (
> mplayer -ao null -vo null -dumpaudio -dumpfile audio_file_fixed.aac
> original_audio_file.aac ) which turned a 43MB (120 minutes flashaaclow) AAC
> file into a 2.6MB AAC file. Given the size of the output file I was
> sceptical that this had worked but it seems to play and be complete, why did
> this shink the file so much? Was this remuxing or something else? iTunes
> still won't import the file so that doesn't seem to be a solution.
>
> Any explanations of the issues here (mainly about AAC I think...) would be
> much appreciated!
>

The .aac file downloaded is a raw AAC format with ADTS headers. iTunes
supports neither raw AAC nor ADTS headers.

There is an option in ffmpeg which can be used to strip the header and
re-pack the AAC into an MP4 container losslessly

ffmpeg.exe -i input.aac -vn -acodec copy -absf aac_adtstoasc output.m4a

This definitely works with my iPhone 3GS but YMMV with other iDevices

You will also need the latest ffmpeg build to do this - 0.6.x do not work

I use this version:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/mplayer-win32/files/FFmpeg/git-c9e16a9/

HTH

Shevek