mp4 -> AAC conversion not completing

[nineman]

I am experiencing difficulty converting groups of files from .mp4 format to plain .aac. Whichever method I use to request the conversion, the destination folder contains a jumble of:

- the original .mp4 files, even when I have asked for them to be deleted

- files with the desired extension .aac but only a fraction of the contents

- file with what seems to be all the desired content but the filename .mp4.t1

I am guessing that for some reason the program is getting stuck, but it's a bit frustrating. The progress bar runs happily to the end. I am on Win98SE and have applied the two upgrades for Common Controls and Scripting, though I can't say in what order I did them. I have tried with fewer and fewer files and folders selected, but even with half a dozen files this happens.

Can you confirm whether the .t1 files would be valid files if I just changed the .mp4.t1 extension to .aac?

[Spoon]

Re: mp4 -> AAC conversion not completing

Are you using the special mp4 >> aac codec? that will just change the container, no converting is needed.

[Unregistered]

Re: mp4 -> AAC conversion not completing

I used that codec, and got the same results. Decided to just leave them as mp4's.

[nineman]

Re: mp4 -> AAC conversion not completing

Hi Spoon- I was using the special MP4 >> AAC codec - I know it's just stripping off a container (this makes my problems more frustrating, not less, because I thought I was ripping all my albums to the aac format required by the phone) but it's on the "convert" menu, no?

Whoever wrote that converter must know where the .t1 files come from?

Thanks to "Unregistered" for confirming I'm not alone. Unfortunately my phone won't accept MP4s, and prefers AACs over MP3s, so I don't have the luxury of sticking with the MP4s.

[Spoon]

Re: mp4 -> AAC conversion not completing

.t1 is nothing I have heard of before, perhaps the mp4 has a substream in it?

[hans-j�rgen]

Re: mp4 -> AAC conversion not completing

To extract a track from an mp4 file, and reconstruct the elementary stream (ES), use the "-extract=<track-id>" option. For this operation the first file name on the command line should be the .mp4 file. If a second file name is given, the track data will be written to that file, otherwise the data will be written to a file with the same name as the .mp4 file with the additional suffix ".t<track-id>"

This is from the mp4creator help file, so it seems you can just delete that additional .t1 extension.

[nineman]

Re: mp4 -&gt; AAC conversion not completing

Thanks Hans-Jurgen. Could you give me a reference to that manual you mentioned? I will look through Google anyway.

As I said, changing the .t1 to .aac does seem to make the files playable. I have discovered that only some of them are complete, however - some look big enough files but the music cuts off a couple of seconds before the end. Others play to a certain point and then crashes the player ("unexpected data"). Curiously, some of the "unpackaged" aac files are even a bit bigger than the .mp4 originals.

I also need to see if this will work for hundreds of files at once, and how I will tell that they have all worked rigth to the end of the song. I paid for and downloaded the extension renaming plug-in for DMC, but it will only change names that it recognises. Like Spoon, it does not recognise the .t1 files. Grrrr...

I am beginning to think the next step is to upgrade to Windows XP and see if that solves some of my many separate problems getting music from CDs onto my phone.

[hans-j�rgen]

Re: mp4 -&gt; AAC conversion not completing

Could you give me a reference to that manual you mentioned?

Almost all documentation files from the MPEG4IP project are located on their SourceForge CVS server, so you can either browse through them on the internet, use a CVS access tool or download a so-called tarball which includes the complete source code from their SourceForge page:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/mpeg4ip/

How did you encode these MP4 files, by the way? Maybe something went wrong back then, e.g. using the outdated PsyTEL codec and combining it with an outdated mp4creator version. So it's also important to know which version of mp4creator Spoon uses in his application, because it might be necessary to update it in order to handle these problems.

In the meantime you could also use another GUI for a current mp4creator version to batch-extract many AAC files from their MP4 container, e.g. Speek's "Ivan & Menno" or foobar2000, mp4UI should work, too.

[nineman]

Re: mp4 -&gt; AAC conversion not completing

Sorry Guys: DMC is now uninstalled and Foobar is doing the business.

I tossed a coin in the first place to see which I should try first and chose the one that wouldn't work n my set-up. Foobar hangs when ripping CDs to m4a, but I have Real Player for that. Foobar is working to convert m4a to aac, and to manage automatic file names & folders.

I must say Foobar is extreeeemely cryptic at first, but I have found the tools I need in the end, and only have to keep remembering where they are!

Thanks for your help. Sadly the money I paid for the DMC Power Pack is down the drain, at least until I upgrade to Windows XP, I think.

[hans-j�rgen]

Re: mp4 -&gt; AAC conversion not completing

Foobar hangs when ripping CDs to m4a, but I have Real Player for that.

This may have several reasons, but without providing mored details I could only do some wild guesses.

[nineman]

Re: mp4 -&gt; AAC conversion not completing

>This may have several reasons, but without providing >more details I could only do some wild guesses.

No worries. Thanks for the thoughts.