iTunes DAAP/AAC Hell

[jtbse]

I've discovered a new iTunes feature that hopefully someone can help me with. My searches of these (or Apple's) forums have yielded no joy.

I would have never encountered this, except I got a new Roku Soundbridge to play with and after setting up iTunes music library sharing (that's the DAAP part) and configuring the SoundBridge, I made a really ugly discovery.

It seems that any file that I've encoded to AAC(.m4a) with DMC won't stream from iTunes. The files play fine in iTunes and they play fine on my iPod. They just won't stream via DAAP to another iTunes node or my SoundBridge :( .

I've spent the better part of a day tracking this down and have determined the following:

1) Files ripped to AAC from Winamp stream fine.
2) Files ripped to AAC from iTunes stream fine.
3) Files converted to .mp3 with DMC work fine.
4) Files converted using DMC's FAAC encoder won't stream.
5) Files converted using the older DMC AAC CLI encoder and renamed won't stream.
6) Files converted using DMC's iTunes AAC encoder won't stream.

If anyone's interested, I can provide sample AAC files encoded with DMC iTunes encoder (won't stream) and encoded with iTunes (will stream).

If anyone can shed some light or help with this, I would really appreciate it. Many of the songs in question came from vinyl, and I'm really not looking forward to going back to the record/cleanup process (deleted the original .wav files :( ) just to fix this streaming problem!!!

Thanks in advance.

[jtbse]

Re: iTunes DAAP/AAC Hell

Well...maybe I've found a clue....this thread

http://forum.dbpoweramp.com/showthread.php?t=6962

[jtbse]

Re: iTunes DAAP/AAC Hell

Ok...well I've determined that this is indeed the "fast-start streaming" thing with iTunes DAAP. So what I've done is to go to the SlimServer UPnP server to stream instead. Only problem I have with it is I have to transcode the .aac to LAME .mp3...not thrilled about that.

But on the SoundBridge forum, someone mentioned that they thought the QuickTime encoder could convert an .aac file to "fast-start streaming", but the poster hadn't tried it.

Does anyone know if the Quicktime encoder (specifically the codec that Spoon provides) can do this, and how to do it? Also if I was to use dmc to convert my aac files in this way, would it be the equivalent of going lossy to lossy with associated loss of quality?

TIA

[gameplaya15143]

Re: iTunes DAAP/AAC Hell

if the source isnt lossless, then its lossy to lossy

there is a thread on hydrogenaudio.org about what you are trying to do (and its cruddy support for certain aac files and stuff).. id post a link, but i cant seem to find the thread

[jtbse]

Re: iTunes DAAP/AAC Hell

Thanks for the info...

I think this is the thread you're talking about:

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=40736&hl=

So unfortunately, the solution is a bit out of my depth. Says to use mp4creator, but I can't find binaries for that, just BSD source code. I'm not really prepared to try and figure out how to make that package for Win32!

Think I'm going to add a wishlist item for Spoon to possibly modify the aac/m4a codec. In the meantime, I've made it a non-issue by using Slimserver to stream. I really like it much better than iTunes anyway!

Thanks for your help.

[Spoon]

Re: iTunes DAAP/AAC Hell

>Says to use mp4creator

Install the dbpoweramp mp4 >> aac container shifting codec (it is supplied with that).