I have a few M4A files I need to decode, so I can turn them into MP3s for my little player.

Has anyone made a free decoder (all I've found has been shareware or retail)?

Thanks!

http://www.nero.com/eng/technologies-aac-codec.html

Thanks. What kinda sucks is it's DOS inability to work with long file names. I've resorted to renaming the files for decoding. Wish there was something with a an actual user interface.

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Foobar2000, for example, works just fine decoding .m4a out of the box and has a good conversion UI, as well. If you want to, you can then reencode to mp3, but be aware of the quality loss that inherently entails with lossy-to-lossy encoding.

I asked recently in the foobar forum why foobar cannot play one m4a file (whereas other programs can). No response there, but maybe you AAC guys can give me an answer?

If it was bought from the iTunes Apple store and has DRM on it, fb2k won't be able to decode it. All iTunes music that is now on sale is DRM-free, however.

Thank you. Assuming that it has DRM (I can't ask the sender anytime soon) is this normal that VLC and WMP+ffdshow play it without problems?

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It will not have DRM if it plays with ffdshow. The error message you got points to a truncated file or some extra non-MP4 data was added to the file (maybe some application added a ID3 tag?).

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Actually, yeah, that's more likely. An automatically appended ID3 tag is out of spec and would explain this behavior.

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Although a front end like foobar2000 will probably be easiest, it's actually not difficult in dealing with long filenames from the command prompt; you simply enclose the file names inside of a pair of quotations. If you wish to do a whole set of files from the command prompt you can use the FOR /F command.