I've searched through posts on this forum and others and google and found nothing really comprehensive. If I've missed it, please post a link if you've gotten this to work. Here is the story:

I was running iTunes on Windows for about 6 months, used it to rip most of my music collection, using aac and m4a because they sound better to me than mp3.

About 2 weeks ago, I started to get wierded out by Microsoft and Longhorn, etc., etc., so I decided to actually make the change and go for Linux. I'm using Mandriva Linux 2005LE with KDE.

I considered installing iTunes through WINE, but was disillusioned about this being an easy task, aside from paying for crossover office, which I will not do. Even though they're "open source", their source code is in no way ready-to-go, so I'm not doing that, either.

Amarok is prehaps the most user-friendly music app I've found yet for KDE, but I cannot play any of my aac or m4a files. I've tried using all of the standard engines (xine, g-streamer, etc) and none of them will play or even read my aac or m4a files. For the record, I installed Amarok from an RPM using the standard rpm command.

So let's hash it out. I know there are plenty of people out there having the same problem as me. If you are, please post and let us know, and we can work through this together. Thanks in advance, all you people who are smarter than me!

You can install the xine engine with the win32 codecs.
Together with the xine addon for amarok. then it can plays everything you throw at it,

Anti file sharing tis-is acc. burn library to disk using 1110101010000101001001 format.
sticky label on cd with song pointing to track.
copy cd to linux, remove cd, change names of tracks by sticky label.
or call apple and buy the acc codac for linux, big bucks that.

Ok, so I just have to install the xine libs, and then the win32 codecs, and then it will work?, or do I have to do something in Amarok, like re-install the xine engine? Does the latest version of taglib do ok with aac and m4a files?

Ok, so you're saying to burn my entire library back to audio cd's? And then re-rip them into mp3's? is this entire post sarcastic?

If you're serious, we're talking big sound degradation (by re-encoding), big $$$ (tons of CD's), and tons of time consumption. There is a better way, just gotta find it.

I am trying to do the same thing that you are. Have you had any luck? I really do not want to convert everything to mp3.

Thanks.

Todd

Adding an amarok-xine-engine package to my system fixed it, and I already had the win32codecs installed. I just switched Amarok to use the Xine engine and it loaded aac and .m4a files without problem. I'm using Amarok 1.3.6 on Arch Linux, so you may have to search for the right packages for your distro.

It seems that I am able to play m4a files it only seems that I cannot add them to my collection. I am using Amarok 1.3.1 and when I use the 'files' tab and browse to a *.m4a I can play it but it will not add to my collection. I get an message that the file is not in my collection and I have the button 'change collection setup'. I go through that but the folder is already chosen so no change takes place and the end result is that the m4a file is not in my collection. The only way that I can play m4a files is one at a time with the file browser.

OK, what is this idiot missing?

Thanks.

Todd

I still dual boot, so I hopped on windows and changed all my .wma files to .ogg. (I'm a big time gamer, otherwise it would be bye bye Bill Gates for me) Maybe you can find a program that will do the same but use aac as the source? I'm trying to find one that will do this as I still have a bunch of .mp4 aac files as well since I used winamp on XP and .mp4 was one of the best it could rip to.

leupi, I'm having the same issue as you. I managed, after much searching to find aac codecs for the xine engine. I've updated amarok to 1.3.8 to no avail. So until some Linux guru can point us in the right direction, we're stuck playing each aac one file at a time

By the way, has anyone had any success getting iTunes6 to work in Wine? I'm a newb at this, so I don't really know how to configure/use wine well.

I'm using iTunes 5 (I think it is) with CrossOver Office and it works pretty well. Sometimes the playback suffers a bit as if there is too much running, gets a bit choppy for no apparent reason. If I reboot everything is fine.

I'm also having the same problem with getting amaroK to recognize my m4a files and add them to my collection. The closest I can get is to make playlists of the m4a files to make them a little more accessible. I've been using Suse 10.0 for about a month now and most things work the way they should most of the time... it's just little things like this that are kind of annoying. So much to learn, so little time!

I gave up with the m4a and converted all of my files to mp3 and started using AmaroK. I find that it is much nicer then iTunes so I am pretty happy with the effort that it took. I found that iTunes with Crossover Office was lacking in quite a bit.

Todd