Album Artist Tag and m4a files

[berrywell]

Hi all,

Do any of you use the .m4a (iTunes) files? I seem to be having a small problem with them and E-Touch.

Basically, they play OK and display in the album window, it's just that I prefer to use the Album Artist check box to keep my collection in order otherwise some of the greatest hits albums tended to end up in the Various Artists section (which upsets my OCD).
Anyway, E-Touch doesn't seem to read or at least ignores the album artist tag from .m4a files. Has anyone else come across this problem, and if so did you manage to rectify it?

Regards

Tel.

[Mark Norville]

Hi Tel,

To give you an honest answer, unless you have an iphone or other rubbish from apple, then I would stay well clear of m4a files. Firstly they are copy protected which is one hassle yes people do rip the protection out of them, but if I cannot be bothered to rip my latest CD I will look at someone who has already done it, saves me time, if there is only m4a files available then I will rip my CD just so that I have MP3.

I will see if I can find some m4a files yep I found 177 files out of my entire collection. I cannot even tag them properly I just found one album so I will have a go.

I just tried to do a update on my library to notice that m4a is not even as default on eTouch so I have put it in and see what happens.

[berrywell]

Hi Guys,

Thanks for both your replies.

First off, .m4a files aren't copy protected, their forerunner the .m4p was but iTunes stopped using them around 7 or 8 years ago. I've been able to use m4a files pretty much everywhere from my car stereo to my 3 year old Nexus 7 tablet.

With regards to the E-touch problem, I can play the .m4a files in E-Touch no problems whatsoever, and it happily lists the artist, album and track titles correctly, it just won't read the album artist tag.

Having dug a little deeper into E-touch this evening, I can see there is a non-mp3 tagger software tool bundled with it, so I think from that I can safely assume E-touch isn't 100% compatible with .m4a files, as such I will embark on changing the files to mp3 over the next few days. Thankfully, I only have about 200 files out of the 18,000+ songs in my collection.

Once again, thanks for your replies.

Regards

Tel.

[Mark Norville]

Trust me as I say this is apple and iTunes so the tracks were copy protected but obviously like MP3 you do have programs that can remove the copy protection. I joined a website a long time ago who done pretty much the same I cannot remember the name of the website now, but at first I thought it was amazing as literally I could download whatever I wanted to, but I had to keep my membership open otherwise the tracks would become useless.

Obviously a CD is copy protected as well, but when you rip then it removes the DRM copy protection from it.

If you consider that MP3 have been around for 20 odd years, m4a is a format which has not been as loved as MP3, and it never will be.

I do agree though that in some respects Barry should support this format more though, as it is still a music format, but it is a minor music format for most of the World, e.g not every one has a apple product, however most of the World has a PC capable of playing MP3.

And fook me if you only have 200 files what the fook are you moaning for man?

I wasn't going to do anything today and yet I downloaded 8 albums by Robin Thicke and then downloaded 21 music videos from the same artist around 2 gigs between the both, so you ruined my Saturday and you was moaning about 200 tracks lol

Regards

Mark

[Barcrest]

M4a isn't copy protected m4p was. I use a 3rd party DLL to read the tag information from audio files so that must be playing up with m4a files. The non mp3 tagger is for videos only as they don't appear to have any consistent way of being tagged.

[ecbrad]

I would ensure that you're tags are synced correctly especially Version 3.1 ---> 3.2

I use Tag and Rename and I suspect that POS iTunes has borked your tags in some way.

Brad

[berrywell]

I would ensure that you're tags are synced correctly especially Version 3.1 ---> 3.2

I use Tag and Rename and I suspect that POS iTunes has borked your tags in some way.

Brad

Thanks for your reply.

I should have said beforehand that I actually use a piece of software called mp3tag to keep all my music files tagged correctly. The reason is because I've found in the past iTunes can alter the tags in it's own database but not change the actual file tags, which used to leave me ever so slightly peeved. 

I assume that software is ok, it does have decent reviews but if anyone has any constructive opinions/hints on file tagging, I'd greatly appreciate it.

Regards

Tel.

[Mark Norville]

I use MP3 Tag all the time and I would say 98% of the time I never get a problem with it. The only thing I notice sometimes is that I have my comments set to blank by default so no comments should be there at all, I don't bother checking but when I have imported a few albums occasionally I have seen some where there are comments usually numbers though.

The only thing that I cannot do in relation to m4a tagging is I like to have the track number as 01, 02 etc rather than 1, 2 for some reason it never changes the track number and sticks to single digits.

Mp3 Tag is also fantastic for tagging music videos, especially if you use my helpful guide

[MassBoost]

M4A (aka MPEG 4 Audio) is just a container file for audio codecs such as AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) or ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec) formats and such. M4A is an audio only container and  it is an extension of the MP4 container, to which MP4's can hold many different audio and video codecs as well as some sub files also. M4A files are unprotected, while protected files usually have an M4P file extension attached to them. A far as Metadata issues you'll have to use something specific to MPEG-4 such as mp4v2.