Skip to main content

Notice

Please note that most of the software linked on this forum is likely to be safe to use. If you are unsure, feel free to ask in the relevant topics, or send a private message to an administrator or moderator. To help curb the problems of false positives, or in the event that you do find actual malware, you can contribute through the article linked here.
Topic: Alternative to M4A container/transpose to another codec? (Read 2336 times) previous topic - next topic
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Alternative to M4A container/transpose to another codec?

I'm not sure where to post this so feel free to move this to another category. But put simply, I've had problems working with the M4A container used for AAC files - specifically when it comes to assigning multiple values to a tag. In my experience, no software supports this consistently, on either Windows or Linux:
  • MusicBrainz Picard can read and write multiple values.
  • MusicBee splits them into slashes when reading, meaning any multi-value tags lose that aspect.
  • Foobar2000 only sees the last value and nothing else.
  • Quod Libet can see them but can't edit them. They have a specific error message for this.
  • On the developer side, TagLib# can support them for some tags, but the current version does not, and ATL .NET (Audio Tools Library) simply cannot.

I need multi-value tags for my music library's workflow, and Vorbis codecs (with their standard tag format) as well as MP3/ID3v2.4 already work well for this. It's just AAC that's the problem, and it's gotten to the point where I transcoded them to FLAC just so I have no quality loss and no fuss. Though, this isn't very practical due to the amount of wasted space, so this leads me to ask this: is there an alternative to using the M4A container, or is there another codec I can transcode the AAC-to-FLAC transcodes I already have to, with minimal to no quality loss?

Re: Alternative to M4A container/transpose to another codec?

Reply #1
Matroska is the next choice then?

ffmpeg -i infile.m4a -codec copy outfile.mka

Re: Alternative to M4A container/transpose to another codec?

Reply #2
Matroska is the next choice then?

ffmpeg -i infile.m4a -codec copy outfile.mka

MKA is promising and would be a fix to all of these woes but, unfortunately it's not well supported either, particularly with Picard and MusicBee. Even Quod Libet's tagger doesn't support it. Haven't heard anything about FB2K though.

Thanks for the suggestion though, and the command to do so.

Re: Alternative to M4A container/transpose to another codec?

Reply #3
I don't think AAC in Matroska is gapless.

 

Re: Alternative to M4A container/transpose to another codec?

Reply #4
Concerning foobar2000: are the tags in question in its list of multivalue fields?

Preferences->Advanced->type "multi" into the search box