iTunes

[Giovanni]

Originally Posted by Heavygain

WMP11 Is really really sweet. It has a music purchase thing in it now, frankly its one of my favorite programs.

It's a fucking system hog thought.

[Strygun]

Is m4a better than mp3? And, is it widely accepted among media players?

[Setari]

As far as I know m4a is just as accepted as mp3, but you could always just re-encode to mp3 if you had to. I'll admit that I don't really know a WHOLE lot on the subject, but I know enough.

[Happy lil Elf]

I use it for it's ease of managing 8+ gigs of music and in burning said music.

It's useful and doesn't have a ton of bullshit that comes with it, which is pretty much all I'm looking for in a music program.

[Biohazzard56]

MP3 are the audio layer of MPEG 3 videos; MP4 is the same thing. Just the audio layer of MPEG 4. Which is the higher definition format, and the AAC codec is far superior to MP3. A 98k bitrate MP4 sounds just as good as a 192k bitrate MP3.

[Rbstr]

Bio, that's not exatly right.
MP3, the audio file, is "MPEG-1 layer 3" it can be used for both MPEG-2 and MPEG-3 vids, but MPEG-3 was abbandoned and doesn't get used.

AAC is Part 7 of MPEG-2 or Part 3 of the MPEG-4 standard.

.m4a is just a way of differentiating mpeg-4 audio files from other .mp4's because MPEG-4 is a container format and can have a large number of differnt components. It is an AAC format and can be higher quality.

most mp3 players don't support anything besides mp3 and wma audio, ipods do MP3 and apples DRMed format only

Originally Posted by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M4a

MPEG-4 Part 14 was based on Apple's QuickTime container format.[1] Although MPEG-4 Part 14 still resembles the QuickTime format, it has been improved upon in many different ways.

MP4 versus M4A:

The existence of two different file extensions for naming audio-only MP4 files has been a source of confusion among users and multimedia playback software. Since MPEG-4 is a container format, MP4 files may contain any number of audio, video, and even subtitle streams, making it impossible to guess what type of streams are present in a MP4 file based on its filename extension alone. In response, Apple Computer started using and popularizing the .m4a file extension. Software capable of audio/video playback should recognize files with either .m4a or .mp4 file extensions, as would be expected, as there are no file format differences between the two. Most software capable of creating MPEG-4 audio will allow the user to choose the filename extension of the created MPEG-4 files.

Read:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-4
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mpeg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-1