Playing M4A, M4P, M4B (AAC) Files

MediaMonkey 4/5 supports:

  • Playback of M4A/M4B (aac audio) files (up to 48KHz) via Windows 7/10 codecs. Note: Windows ‘N’ editions don’t include codecs, and they need to be installed manually.
  • Playback of ALAC files.
  • Encoding/decoding of M4A/M4B/ALAC (including > 48KHz) files via the MediaMonkey Codec Pack (purchased separately). The MediaMonkey Codec Pack is also required for playing M4A/M4B streamed from a UPnP (DLNA) server.

M4P files are an Apple-proprietary format protected by Digital Rights Management which prevent them from playing on systems or apps other than the ones used to purchase them. If you have such files, you have 2 options:

  1. Remove the DRM by getting unprotected versions of the files from Apple, so that they can be played on any device (recommended). To do so, Erase the M4P files from your PC (or move them so that iTunes doesn’t see them) and then re-download them from Apple. Since Apple no longer uses DRM protection for purchased media files, the re-downloaded files will be fully playable in MediaMonkey and on other devices.
  2. Install Quicktime which supports playback of DRM’ed content to play them (along with M4A/M4B/ALAC) including those > 48KHz in MediaMonkey. For this to work you’ll have to install Quicktime, and ensure that the machine is correctly authorized in iTunes to play the DRM’ed files. This approach is not preferred because Quicktime is not maintained by Apple, and because the files will still have problems playing on other devices.

NOTES

  • M4B Audiobooks over ~500MB in size fail to play when MediaMonkey is relying in QuickTime for playback due to a limitation in QuickTime. In that case install the MediaMonkey AAC/M4A Encoder/Decoder Plug-in (purchased separately).
  • Playback of M4A/M4B/ALAC in MediaMonkey can fail if you’ve upgraded from earlier versions of MediaMonkey and haven’t uninstalled a previous version of the Codec Pack before installing the codec pack compatible with the currently installed version of MediaMonkey.

Applies to: ,

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