What is m4a?

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I was on youtube downloading a song from the plain white t's and the format is m4a. how can i change it to an mp3 format or something that an MP3 player can support

M4A = technology from MPEG4. Motion Picture Expert Group Layer 4 Audio. It's truncated to 3 letters because of the limits of 8dot3 format. All files had to fit into this. Since Windows95, files have been able to use LFN support - Long File Name so the 8dot3 format can be broken.

The easiest and failsafe way I do it when I want to be lazy is to burn to disc and rip from it as MP3 when I can't be bothered to convert it to MP3 directly. There are audio converters out there, but a lot of sound files need decoders. The term CoDec is usually required to convert into a format. Converting to MP3 would require the coder to encode. Reading from would require the decoder, hence Windows Media Player has the MP3 codec as standard from version 10, so you can rip to MP3 instead of WMA

m4a is also known as AAC compression in a "mp4" container

you may want to check to see if your "mp3" player supports the format directly by just trying to load the song on. all ipods and some other "mp3" players support AAC audio, it's worth a try

iTunes can convert files from .m4a to .mp3. Just remember to clean up their id3 tag files when you are done.



Mike