iTunes .m4a and Kenwood

BY Cheap
|

Oh, this is frustrating.

I buy my music from iTunes.  This started when I had an iPhone, and even though I no longer have an iPhone, I find iTunes to be the easiest way to find new music and buy it.  Consequently, most of my music is stored in .m4a files, which is an MPEG-4 container with AAC encoded audio.

So when I purchased a new Kenwood system for my truck, I was careful to choose a model that supports AAC files.

It turns out, that is not enough.

The Kenwood DPX502BT that I bought only supports AAC in .aac files.  A file with a .aac extension evidently has no container.  It is just the AAC-encoded audio.  I found an online converter to convert a .m4a file to a .aac file, and the DPX502BT played it.  However, it was missing the metadata (the title and artist).  Why?  Because that was stored in the MPEG-4 container.

I haven’t figured out what to do.

Convert all my iTunes library to MP3?  It may come to that.  Apple has instructions.  Ugh.  It creates a second item in my library for the converted file.  That’s going to be a mess.