I think I have a problem with the Columbus unit not recognising music tracks that I have ripped with Win Amp. Win Amp is ripping in .m4a format and it seems the Columbus unit cannot read these files? .mp3's are read just fine. Snag is, I have >1000 tracks in .m4a format that I want to listen to! Thanks.

columbus can only read .mp3 and unprotected .wma files. M4a are AAC format files that the columbus cannot read.

Thanks, thought so.

If you're on a Windows PC, click here. If you're a Mac user, try this.

Ray

Cheers, just the job!

Wouldn't you get a better result re-ripping the CDs, rather than re-encoding?

I use iTunes and, as a result of this problem, have now set it to rip CD's directly into MP3 format. Files copied previously have had to be converted using any of the free convertors available for Windows.

Wouldn't you get a better result re-ripping the CDs, rather than re-encoding?

Not necessarily. To take one example, ABBA's "The Visitors" track on my computer in .m4a format occupies 5,645,699 bytes. In .mp3 format, the same tune takes up 5,557,602 bytes, so the conversion from .m4a, although resulting in a slightly smaller file size and - possibly - a slight degradation in quality, it's so small (about 1½%) I doubt that it would be noticeable in the car.

I've just re-ripped around 20 CDs as I've recently bought some Bowers & Wilkins speakers for my iMac, but >1,000 tracks has to be in excess of 80 CDs, each of which you'd have to handle, remove, set up in the player, etc., etc. However, run all of the .m4a tracks through a converter to reside in the original directories and in one copying operation, you're done.

Ripping into .flac or .wav files is clearly to be done from the CD (and the difference is astonishing), but I see no problem from .m4a to .mp3 at all.

Ray