ALAC with Chapters in iTunes ? Options

[Xenion]

Using Foobar's converter with qaac (-A - -o %d) and the "generate multi-track files" feature writes a m4a alac file with chapter information that is perfectly readable in foobar itself. In iTunes no Chapter information is available. Is iTunes not able to read chapters inside m4a alacs?

[mixminus1]

Is foobar embedding a cue sheet in the .m4a files, or is it actually writing chapters in a metadata stream, like mp4box?

In either case, iTunes won't read them - it doesn't know what cue sheets are, and Apple apparently uses their own - or at least a modified - format for storing chapters in MPEG-4 files.

FWIW, there is a nice little program that can embed chapters (and images, if you so desire) in an .m4a file that is readable by iTunes: Slideshow Assembler.

Note that it doesn't appear to work with ALAC files - it uses Quicktime for parsing, but it throws a couple warnings when trying to embed in an ALAC file and the resulting .m4a isn't readable by iTunes.

Since the problem appears to be in how SSA is calling/interfacing with Quicktime, I'm "guessing" that there is a way to get the chapter data correctly embedded in an ALAC file - it is, after all, still an .m4a/.mp4 container - but SSA just isn't doing it right.