M4A Files: Questions and Answers
 

I have been trying to be a good user and share some of my music. All of my personal music has been imported to my 10.3 OS Mac. in ACC format, which is supposed to be better than MP3 with the same amount of compression. This is for use in my IPOD. I've noticed that no-one seems to down load the M4A files (ACC) yet they will download the MP3 files I have gotten from the site. Is this from lack of knowledge or do ACC (M4A) files not work on any other platform but IPOD?

You can tell I'm a newbie. About 2 lines down is a post with some info on the questions I asked. I do heartely agree. I-Tunes is the way to go for both Mac and (ugh) PC's.

I think b/c m4a files lack the id info that mp3's have it's a bit scary for some people to downld them. Also in my experience, m4a files are too often encoded at lower bit rates such as 128 kbps. I don't know why people are so miserly when it comes to encoding files. 320 is the best possible & so it should be done whether that be vbr or cbr. See http://www.gnutellaforums.com/showth...threadid=31710 & also http://www.m4a.com/ (this is an older site!)

One problem is the default of many apps is to encode at 128.

But yes, for the same bit rate, m4a or mpeg4 audio is smaller in size.

Actually I take that back! m4a files CAN be given id tags but 'so few' people do it! And without them people often don't know what they really are. Too few details can be deprimental to appeal. That's speaking from my own experience & from what comments I've read elsewhere about m4a files.