You don’t need ffmpeg on a Mac to play m4a it’s an apple format. Do other apps play them ok and I don’t mean just iTunes if not then possibly they have some drm if they have been bought via iTunes possibly, although I though those are usually m4p.
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This is what I would do, and have done, in the past. Just get everything to FLAC and go forward. Keep the originals around in an “Archive” folder out of view of Roon if you feel like you need to, but FLAC is a very good choice for forward and platform compatibility.
I’ve done this with folder hierarchies using dBpoweramp’s “Video Converter” app. You can point it at a tree of files and folders, tell it to convert into a parallel tree, and let it do its thing. You’ll get a lossless version of the decoded bitstream, so it’s hard to imagine that it won’t be equivalent to the originals.
If you want to poke around inside your originals, you can install HomeBrew on your Mac if you don’t already have it and then use HomeBrew to install ffmpeg as a command line tool. This won’t install ffmpeg as a codec on your machine, but it will give you the ffmpeg tool. Once you have that, you can run:
ffmpeg -i yourfile.m4a
and that will tell you what’s inside the file. You’ll probably also get an error because there is no output file specified, but you can at least see info about the contents.
If you’re not familiar with HomeBrew, here’s info on what it is and how to install it: https://brew.sh
Once you’ve done that, you can install ffmpeg with:
brew install ffmpeg
You use ffprobe to find out info about the files it’s part of ffmpeg install. Ffprobe pathtofile.
Thanks for the correction. I’ve used “ffmpeg -i” in the past but it looks like you get more from ffprobe.
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I would think that one listening to audio books files would not be as susceptible to lossy rips quality as when it comes to music files.
While ALL of my music is cd quality or better (unless it simply doesnt exist), I would imagine that something like 256kbps for spoken word is just fine. For me anyway.
I would be inclined to agree except that, as mentioned upthread (although admittedly quite a way up) these are full cast audio dramas with sound effects & music.
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Roon has always played my m4a files, both lossy and lossless via a Mac snd via ROCK.
OP how do you know roon wont play them? Does it even show them? The issue may well be that roon doesn’t know how to import, label, and tag a file that it can’t understand as being a piece of music.
The playback of the format itself should be a non issue.
To be honest, I’m actually now hoping it might be relatively few files that are not showing up. (I mean, there are probably over 2,000 files in question so “a few” could still be a good number, but anyway, much less work that I’d feared.)
This whole process started with me finding I had a bunch of M4A files and, not seeing that format listed amongst the ones Roon could play, I dived straight in and asked the original question.
The first reply informed me that M4A is just a wrapper & it’s what’s inside that would determine whether or not Roon could play it. Another mentioned DRM. Another couple pointed out that as an Apple format, I shouldn’t have a problem playing them.
So off I went down the rabbit hole, responding to all of the various suggestions and testing out various solutions. What I probably should have done is tagged a handful of files correctly so that I could easily find them in Roon and made that my start point.
Anyway, after a while I realised that would be the best way forward so I decided to slow down and be more methodical. As I’ve tagged them, I’ve noticed that so far, all of them are visible in Roon and play perfectly well. Roon tells me that they are AAC files of varying bit rates, etc.
Now all I have to do is to work through them all and find the ones that Roon doesn’t see. Hopefully they will be easy to fix, as I can do the FLAC thing.
Seeing as there are so many files, it will take me a while. This thread will probably be dead before I finish, but when I do manage to find files that Roon can’t see, I’ll report back
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Did you check if the missing files are not listed by Roon as failed imports?
Well this is interesting because:
a) I didn’t know such a thing existed
b) None of the files referenced in this thread are there
c) Lots of other files are there which I will now have to look into
EDIT: Of the 700 files that are on that list, only 160 of them are audio files. One is an M4A & it’s a corrupted Weather Report track, so I’m off to fix that right now.
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