AAC file re-visit

In my previous post, I mentioned about AAC and the ID3 tag. And I mentoined that

I have an AAC audio file (technically M4A) […]

I used Audacious previously, then change to DeadBeef. The main reason I changed was because I kept failing to play AAC audio file. What’s wrong? FFplay can play it, SMPlayer can play it, DeadBeef can play it, Clementine can play it, but Audacious cannot. Audacious has a AAC plugin, it should support AAC format.

But if I play the AAC file with Audacious, I will get this error,

Unknown playback error (check the console for detailed error information) ERROR aac.cc:373 [play]: No valid frame header found.

Seach online and found that, it is the file extension issue. So, what is it?

Using the “exiftool”, I found that the MIME Type is video/mp4. That is the fix!!

I renamed the AAC file to Mp4. Now Audacious can play the file well.

Now, when it was in the AAC extension, in order to view the audio metadata such as author, title, ablum, I used Kid3 to edit the APE instead of ID3v2, so that FFplay can play it. ID3v2 is actually for the MP3 format. If use ID3v2 on the AAC extension audio file, FFmpeg cannot convert it and FFplay and SMPlayer both failed to play the audio file properly.

But after I rename the file into MP4, there is an issue. MP4 metadata (I think it is also ID3v2) cannot be written using Kid3, due to the existence of APE tag. (Kid3 doesn’t mention anything about this, I solve this heuristically.)

  1. So, I need to remove the APE tag using Kid3 by naming the file as AAC first.
  2. Then, I rename it to MP4 and use Kid3 to edit the ID3v2

As a conclusion, I use back Audacious as my primary audio player. It is the best!

(Why not DeadBeef? DeadBeef lack of the feature to copy-paste the songs from one playlist to another.)