Format of BBC Radio 4 .m4a files

[Jon Davies]

On 9 September 2015 at 11:05, RS <richard22j at zoho.com> wrote:
> If I try to play the BBC Radio 4 .m4a files in the Longevity player the player freezes for about 4min.

I recall hearing about similar behaviour with someone's mp3 player -
it appeared that the player was reading through the entire file to
read some metadata at the end before actually playing the audio
stream.  I don't beleive that the m4a files that come out of iplayer
are optimised for streaming, and I believe that some of the metadata
is at the end of the file.  So it's possible that your player is
having a similar problem.

On ubunutu I use "mp4file --optimize" to optimize each m4a file that
pops out of get_iplayer, there are other programs that do similar
things.  You could try this and see if it solves your problem, and if
it does it's possible to write a script that get_iplayer runs after
each download to do this every time.

Jon