I have Nero 7 which I just purchased. When I enode files from my Cd's to a AAC digital audio file they will not play on the I-Tunes media player or in JRiver's Media Center. In I-Tunes they show as a AAC-video file. How do you encode audio files in AAC using Nero. It seems like it should be a simple thing to do. Also, when I burned the files to a CD to play on my car stereo they would not play. I have a Sony player in my car that plays AAC files. The player did not recognize the files enocded using Nero 7. I don't see any other option in Nero 7 other than digital audio AAC files. I don't understand what the Nero program is doing.

Nero does a decent job. The real "issue" is the fact that it respects the standard .mp4 extension for the MPEG-4 container, instead of going for the .m4a one introduced by Apple. The latter is meant to make clear that you're dealing with a pure audio file. Technically this Apple thing doesn't differ from the standard extension, hence renaming the .mp4 files to .m4a should fix the issue. I just wonder that even JRiver refuses playing these encodings back - it accepts Apple's custom brew, but doesn't support the official ISO .mp4 standard?

I sometimes hate Apple for having thought that they had actually made things easier with their different filename extensions for one and the same container. My mobile phone plays .mp4 audio back, but identifies it as video as well and therefore doesn't read the tags. .m4a tag reading works just well, but sharing this with a friend's mobile phone via Bluetooth doesn't work at all - his one doesn't even allow transferring .m4a files, but only .mp4 ones. Talking about reliable standards...

Thanks for explaining the technical aspects of the AAC codec. I've been trying to figure out how to rename a file to the m4a extension. When I look at the file name in Windows Exployer it doesn't show the file extenstion (.MP4). It just shows the file name without the extension. I'll keep working at it.

Open Explorer, go to "Tools" and click on the "View" tab. Scroll down to "Hidden files and folders", and unckeck "Hide extensions for known file types". You will then be able to see your file extensions.

In Windows XP, open Folder options (Tools\Folder Options...), go to tab View and deselect "Hide extensions for known file types". After that you will be able to change extension.

Edit: I was toooo slow!

In Win Explorer (on Win XP): Tools>Folder Options... click on the tab View and make sure the option 'Hide extensions for known file types' is not checked.
Then you'll be able to change extension from Explorer

Edit: I was way too slow

[quote name='eevan' date='Aug 7 2007, 08:18' post='508954']
In Win Explorer (on Win XP): Tools>Folder Options... click on the tab View and make sure the option 'Hide extensions for known file types' is not checked.
Then you'll be able to change extension from Explorer

Edit: I was way too slow
[/quote
With your information I was able to rename the file to .m4a. Nero 7 has only 1 playback program called 'Showtime'. To me, this program is far inferior to I-tunes. Showtime looks like an old style program that Nero hasn't done much to improve. The files I enocde as AAC with Nero 7 will play fine on Showtime. However, if I want to play the files on I-Tunes I will have to change the file extenstion to .m4a. I think that it is ridicuous that software companies make these AAC codecs with different extensions that only play-back on their own program. I have 900 CD's. I can't rename every file I encode. Because of this, I can't use Nero and it was a waste of money to buy. If I want to encode in AAC, I will use I-Tunes-plus it's free.

You can rename all files in a folder at once using Command prompt and command: ren *.mp4 *.m4a

Or use free program like http://www.freetools.stebasoft.de/multirename.php?lang=eng

You can also try foobar2000 as playback program. It also can be customized to give you the similar feeling as iTunes.

I am not in front of my home computer. but I recall being able to customize Nero to use the .m4a extension. You just need to mess around with the program. You know, this is really an Apple/iTunes/iPod issue, and not Nero. MP4 is the standard extension. There are always work arounds, and it is something that you will have to live with owning an iPod. It comes with the territory.

J. River Media Center 12 (the current version) uses the installed OS level codecs for mp4, m4a, m4v etc playback. The default is Apple's QuickTime. If QT is installed the imported mp4 files should appear under the video category in MC12 (this is how QT decides to handle them).

However, you should be able to make mp4 audio files appear correctly under the audio category if you install suitable DirectShow mp4 splitter & decoder filters and configure the mp4 file type to be played through DirectShow.

I have used the CCCP filter & codec pack that contains the needed DirectShow components. This J. River wiki page has more info about DirectShow playback in MC12:
http://wiki.jrmediacenter.com/index.php/Di..._Playback_Guide


Edit

If you just want to change the filename extension you can do that easily with MC12. Search for .mp4, select the files and use the Find and Replace tool for changing .mp4 to .m4a in the Filename field.

Though I guess I'm a bit too late with this:

For a large number of files stored in different folders there's an even more comfortable solution. Create a text file named mp4tom4a.cmd, edit it using Notepad and paste this line into it:


Place the file inside the parent directory of your music collection, e.g. C:\Music\mp4tom4a.cmd, then start it with a simple double-click. It will recursively search all available subfolders for .mp4 extensions and rename them to .m4a. This will fix your issue with a single command. Be careful about the contents of the subdirectories, if there were any MPEG-4 videos, then these would be renamed as well.

It clearly wasn't a waste buying the Nero suite, since the .m4a files should be played back by the majority of audio players, not only iTunes. I'm using them in conjunction with Amarok (Linux), Winamp and foobar2000 myself. Since Apple was the first one to heavily and successfully promote AAC, lots of audio decoders have been updated to accept .m4a as an alternative to .mp4. And renaming your encodings to the proper extension will be easy by going for one of the solutions given above.

For future encodings have a closer look at the Nero software for the possibility to create .m4a files instead of .mp4 ones, as mentioned by drbeachboy. It should allow doing so, since even Nero's free command line encoder can be set up to create .m4a data. For example, I use the command line thingy in conjunction with foobar2000 as a graphical frontend, in order to encode to Nero AAC in the .m4a instead of the default .mp4 format.