Tidying up Radio Downloads

[Vangelis forthnet]

On Tue Aug 22 16:27:05 BST 2017, Ralph Corderoy wrote: 

> But it works by decompressing the .m4a, 
> letting you edit it, and then lossy re-encoding 
> if you want a .m4a back.

 ... If m4a metadata is important to OP 
(or anyone else editing GiP m4a files), 
the use of Audacity and any other similar 
audio (waveform) editor usually results 
in the loss of the MP4 tag in the process. 
One needs to re-tag the edited file with GiP 
(see --tag-only & --tag-only-filename options)

 The advantage of using FFmpeg is that all m4a 
metadata except for m4a thumbnail (a 4-year-old 
bug that still won't be fixed, see: 
https://trac.ffmpeg.org/ticket/2798 ) 
will be transferred over to the edited file...
Be sure to include -vn in the command if 
the output file extension is ".m4a"

 Another similar project is 

https://github.com/nu774/m4acut

but do not ask me how to compile it for Linux :-)

 On Windows, if one wants very precise m4a editing, 
then I would, once more, suggest the closed source 
but freeware mp3DirectCut; it doesn't (in contrast to 
m4acut) support the MP4 container of .m4a files, 
but if you provide it with an FFmpeg path it auto-demuxes 
to an .aac adts file, which it does support!
After the very precise and lossless editing, 
one must remux back to .m4a file via ffmpeg/mp4box etc. 
and retag with GiP (as posted above), if, that is, 
original file was a GiP audio fetch... 

Best regards all, 
Vangelis.