Vinyl LPs that I digitize (using VinylStudio) are imported to iTunes as lossless files with no problems. However, Roon (currently in trial) won’t import them, and marks them as “audio stream format not supported.” How can I resolve this?
Unfortunately, m4a is not supported in Roon. Moreover, note that M4A is not lossless but lossy. You’d do better digitising to either FLAC or AIFF, but first try renaming the file with the extension AAC.
M4A is a file extension for an audio file encoded with advanced audio coding (AAC) which is a lossy compression. M4A was generally intended as the successor to MP3, which had not been originally designed for audio only but was layer III in an MPEG 1 or 2 video files. M4A stands for MPEG 4 Audio.
I’ve done a couple of vinyl rips using VinylStudio too and had no problem with the files - ALAC (Apple Lossless) in .m4a 
@Martin_Webster .m4a as a container holding AAC (lossy) as well as ALAC (lossless) works fine with Roon - usually. What’s not supported are copy protected files but that’s not the issue here.
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I have been saving as Apple Lossless in an m4a file (as mentioned), but it doesn’t show up in a Roon scan of my iMac.
At the moment, I’ve no idea what the problem might be - I would have said it works out-of-the-box, unluckily not (yet) for you.
I assume you’ve added the directories holding your vinyl rips as a source in Roon
( Settings > Storage > Folders ) - especially if those files do not reside under the music / itunes / folder of your Mac. You did, right?
M4a is supported I have a ton of them from iTunes. M4p is not which is the DRM protected version.
Roon is scanning the folder which contains the ripped vinyl.
Make sure your rips are using a common bit-depth like 16, 24 or 32 or Roon might fail to parse the tracks. See also:
Now I’m even more confused. After I re-saved the file, Roon recognized it. I would like to understand this before I launch into a time-consuming re-save. Thanks to everyone for your help so far!
Just in case no other solution comes up: yate has an option to save all audio files loaded / open, so you wouldn’t have to do this manually.
Something dodgy in the header of the file no doubt. I have had stuff like this on a mac before where saving it out fixed problems. Likely Vinylstudio is not writing good file headers and missing something.
I resaved all my rips as *.FLAC files. When Vinyl Studio saves, it saves in an ARTIST folder all of the *.FLAC track files. Roon does not appear to be looking at any folders within the high-level folder specified as a STORAGE location. I assumed Roon would scan sub-folders… what am I doing wrong?
ROON/DIGITIZED/ARTIST/track.flac
Try this:
On your desktop, make a new folder and call it “Roon Music” or something and just leave it empty. Go into Roon settings and go to the storage section. Then click on “+ Add Folder”. Select the folder you just created on the desktop. Then just move a couple of albums or songs into that folder and see if Roon starts to import them. See if that works and let us know.
It does not. It did find the first album in Vinyl Studio rips, but nothing more.
How did it find it? Did you put it into the desktop folder you just made? Or do you have Roon looking at other folders? If you have Roon looking at other folders, get rid of them in Roon so that it is just looking at the one folder on your desktop. Sorry, that was my fault for not mentioning it. Basically we want Roon to only be looking in one location. Then, put some of the FLAC files in it. If Roon does not import them, try putting a music file in there that was not ripped from Vinylstudio
I should have mentioned before, but it was always there. Roon is looking at no other folders; in fact I purchased a brand new HDD just for Roon and have limited myself to just Vinyl Studio rips for now.
I can’t speak to the general problem. But I can confirm that ROON does scan all the subfolders underneath the top directory you assign in the STORAGE location. I have thousands of ARTIST folders and each of those has ALBUM folders, and multi-disk albums even have DISK 1, DISK 2, etc. subfolders under ALBUM directory. All of these get scanned and imported automatically.
ok. Do you have any other music files on the computer? Like something you downloaded from iTunes or anywhere else?