iRivers and M4A Playback

[Jiminy]

Is there any way to customize, say, an iRiver H10 to enable M4A playback without completely converting ro rockbox?  All I really want out of rockbox is to be able to play all my m4a's, and if there's a way to do this without shortening my battery life so much, that'd be awesome.

Thanks in advance for any help.

[elborak]

No.

[Mr. Brownstone]

ROCKbox no longer shortens your battery-life. It increases it.

[linuxstb]

ROCKbox no longer shortens your battery-life. It increases it.

That's true for the H100 and H300 series, but not the H10.

[HCN]

I just discovered that my iHP-120 doesn't playback m4a files correctly. Is there some plugin to install?

[Lear]

No. The "plugin" required is a part of the default Rockbox install. However, Rockbox won't play all m4a files. A couple of possible reasons:

• The file is DRM protected (but then it should be called m4p).
• The file contains HE-AAC, in which case the playback wouldn't be realtime on an H120.
• The file isn't streamable; i.e., the metadata comes after the audio data. Can be fixed with different programs. In Foobar2000, the function is called "Optimize MP4 Layout" (IIRC).

[linuxstb]

Lear,

Do you know of an easy way for users to check for 2) and 3) (and maybe even 1) ?

[GodEater]

Does the GNU "file" utility recognise .m4a files? If so, I assume it would fail on a DRM'd one since the content would be essentially goblidigook ?

[saratoga]

Where did you get the m4a file from?

[Lear]

Lear,

Do you know of an easy way for users to check for 2) and 3) (and maybe even 1) ?

Number 2 is easily checked with something like Foobar2000, or any other program that can display detailed MP4 file information (check for HE-AAC or SBR). For number 3, I'm only aware of mp4dump, part of the mpeg4iptools package. I don't have a file of type 1, so I don't know about that.