Batch conversion question

[2Funky]

I have a large music collection (800,000 files) which I have diligently ripped over the last 20 years using a variety of whatever hardware I had or software that was available at the time. I keep them all in Windows file folders organized in a way where I can find what I want and listen to it on whatever media player I am using - one at a time. It is a big mess of metadata, file extensions, etc. I have started using Roon and really like its user interface for playing files, but it does not support .m4a extensions, although it supports the aac format. Please excuse me if I misstate something here because I really do not understand much, but my hope was to use dbPoweramp to go through my entire collection, a little at a time. I would leave the .mp3 files untouched, but hope to use the dbpoweramp converter to convert and cleanup my .m4a files and rename them to .aac, which apparently Roon can import - with the correct data embedded.

My questions to those that understand all this are:
1. Does this strategy make sense?
2. Can I use batch processing on large groups of files - say 1000 at a time with the instruction "change .m4a to .aac" and will dbpoweramp ignore the ones with .mp3 extensions and only do the ones with .m4a?

I would prefer not to go through my entire collection to find the .m4a files myself, but would prefer to turn dbpoweramp loose on portions of it to fix what it can find needs fixing.

Thanks for any advice or tips you can offer.

[GBrown]

Re: Batch conversion question

AAC is the name of the codec format, these are saved typically with the m4a extension. There is plenty of discussion on the Roon forums about this, and it certainly appears that m4a files are supported. You may want to confirm this further before you perform any unnecessary action on such a large library.

[garym]

Re: Batch conversion question

I can play m4a files on Roon. So yes, you should investigate further. Posting on the roon forum should get you some useful help.

[2Funky]

Re: Batch conversion question

GBROWN, This is what I got from the roon forum. You are right, it is very informative:

"AAC is the actual audio codec that was used to compress the audio, while m4a is just a file extension.

It causes confusion because most m4a files have AAC content, but they don&*8217;t have to, they can also have content that was created with a different codec. In this case, renaming them from .m4a to .aac won&*8217;t change that content.

The most likely cause for the failure to play them is exactly that, the m4a files contain content from a codec that is not supported by Roon. In this case you will need an audio converter to convert them."

So my question is whether dbPoweramp can identify which m4a files I have that do not have content that Roon can deal with. Since I am not the brightest bulb in the room, I was hoping that I could use dbPoweramp to say "Convert all my m4A files to XXX" and give it a batch of 1000 files of all different types, and that it would take the m4a with odd contents (non-aac?) and convert them into something that Roon could import. Does that make sense?

[garym]

Re: Batch conversion question

Where were these files created.It would be very strange for an m4a file to contain anything other than AAC or ALAC. Roon will handle m4a files with AAC or ALAC contents. It would be very odd to have an m4a file that contained something Roon doesn't support, as Roon supports most codecs. I think mainly it doesn't support windows media codecs. Will roon play any of your m4a files? See this link. Does your roon labs server run on a machine that has mp3 or aac codecs availalble, as these are not shipped with the roon core. But one can add these (I recall I did when I created a Roon ROCK for a server).

https://help.roonlabs.com/portal/en/kb/articles/faq-what-audio-file-formats-does-roon-support*Built-In_Support

[garym]

Re: Batch conversion question

My advice is to determine an m4a file that won't play on Roon and provide a copy to @spoon on this forum (so he can determine the contents and if they are not AAC or ALAC) and then start a thread on the roon forum in @support and provide a copy of an m4a that won't play and have the Roon support team determine what the problem is with the file contents.

and I assume you've seen these:

https://community.roonlabs.com/t/apple-m4a-won-t-play/185759

https://community.roonlabs.com/t/roon-will-not-play-tidal-aac-files/197422/4

[2Funky]

Re: Batch conversion question

Thank-you for all your help and advice. I will get the wheels rolling on this and let you know what I find out.

[2Funky]

Re: Batch conversion question

The newest of these files were ripped from CD on a Dell PC using Windows Media Player and Windows 11. I choose the recommended AAC setting which resulted in a .m4a file. I have the ROON core resident on this PC. These files show up and play fine using ROON on the PC but when I try to use Roon ARC on my Android phone they will not play and show "corrupt media". When I re-ripped the files as .mp3 files, the played fine on my phone using ROON arc. I started investigating this on the Roon forum, and got many suggestions that Windows Media player was a very poor choice and that I must have some corrupt encoding data and to switch to dbpoweramp. I then noticed that many of my .m4a files that I had ripped over the years did not show up in Roon when I checked the "Skipped files" tab. This led to the discussion that .m4a files can contain things other than just pure AAC data, so that is when I got on the dbpoweramp forum to see if dbpoweramp could be used as a generic cleaning tool for a batch of files since it is impractical for me at this point to look at each m4a file and determine the problem for Roon ARc. I now suspect that with all the encoders, PCs,rip SW, converters, etc that I have used over the years that I have a jumble of data and it is hopeless to try to get it all sorted out and that I should just listen to the radio! Again thanks for your help but I feel here is no easy solution.

[GBrown]

Re: Batch conversion question

The newest of these files were ripped from CD on a Dell PC using Windows Media Player and Windows 11. I choose the recommended AAC setting which resulted in a .m4a file. I have the ROON core resident on this PC. These files show up and play fine using ROON on the PC but when I try to use Roon ARC on my Android phone they will not play and show "corrupt media". When I re-ripped the files as .mp3 files, the played fine on my phone using ROON arc. I started investigating this on the Roon forum, and got many suggestions that Windows Media player was a very poor choice and that I must have some corrupt encoding data and to switch to dbpoweramp. I then noticed that many of my .m4a files that I had ripped over the years did not show up in Roon when I checked the "Skipped files" tab. This led to the discussion that .m4a files can contain things other than just pure AAC data, so that is when I got on the dbpoweramp forum to see if dbpoweramp could be used as a generic cleaning tool for a batch of files since it is impractical for me at this point to look at each m4a file and determine the problem for Roon ARc. I now suspect that with all the encoders, PCs,rip SW, converters, etc that I have used over the years that I have a jumble of data and it is hopeless to try to get it all sorted out and that I should just listen to the radio! Again thanks for your help but I feel here is no easy solution.

No surprise, since MS has been very slow at adding in support for the m4a format that has been more traditionally supported by Apple. No different than Apple's "support" of FLAC I guess. There may be a better third-party codec plug-in option for WMP. But I wouldn't trust that. This is something I have been doing for years now with dBpoweramp.

[garym]

Re: Batch conversion question

I hate to say this, but maybe you are best reripping all your CDs to FLAC. I understand the pain. I ripped about 5,000 CDs to mp3. Then learned a lot more and reripped everything to FLAC with dbpoweramp. A pain, but well worth it. Now I have everything in lossless.