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.

I just found that, if I have an AAC audio file (technically M4A), and if I added the ID3 tag 2 (aka ID3v2), then the audio file will failed to be converted by ffmpeg.

It can be either converted to mp3

• using DeadBeef audio player, or
• remove the ID3v2 tag then convert

So, how to add the metadata like ID3 tag? Use the Kid3 and add the Tag 3 (aka APE tag). This will not affect how ffmpeg to read the file.