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Topic: ALAC with Chapters in iTunes ? (Read 4850 times) previous topic - next topic
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ALAC with Chapters in iTunes ?

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?

ALAC with Chapters in iTunes ?

Reply #1 –
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.
"Not sure what the question is, but the answer is probably no."