Unknown Error (-50) when converting to AAC

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Level 1

33 points

Unknown Error (-50) when converting to AAC

My iTunes library is 27GB of mp3 music, thousands of tracks.

I've decided to convert the whole lot to AAC, so I made sure my iTunes was set to encode to AAC, 128kbps, selected the whole library and control-clicked and chose "Convert to AAC", and left it.

This went fine for about a thousand tracks, then failed and stopped on one particular track on an album with the message "Error occurred while converting the file <track name>. An unknown error occurred (-50)".

I clicked OK, then unselected everything and tried converting just the one track - it got so for on, the the same error. This is track 11 of 13 on a album, and 1-10 converted fine. I then tried track 12, and it gave the same error immediately, the progress bar never went up at all. Track 13 converted fine.

I decided I'd just leave those 2 as mp3's, and selected the remaining few thousand songs, control-clicked and chose "Convert to AAC" again and left it.

I've now discovered it's done the same thing on another track (much later, it successfully converted thousands more before failing). This time it's track 43 of 50 on an album. I tried the next track 44, it went fine, so I'm now doing the remaining lot again.

Any idea what's causing this?

Cheers

iMac 20" (Early 2008), 2.4Ghz Intel, 2GB RAM, Mac OS X (10.5.4)

Posted on Sep 4, 2008 4:25 AM

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Answer 1

PT

Level 7

20,888 points

Sep 4, 2008 7:10 AM in response to markmc78

What was the point of converting thousands of MP3 to 128-AAC files? What bit rate were the MP3s? Because converting from one compressed lossy format to another compressed lossy format will result in additional quality loss and the AAC files (in theory) will be lower quality than the original MP3 files.
Patrick

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Answer 2

markmc78 Author

Level 1

33 points

Sep 4, 2008 8:43 AM in response to PT

I'm not enough of an audiophile to care too much about sound quality - to my ears I can't tell much difference between my existing 192Kbps mp3's and new 128Kbps AAC's. In fact, when I tried a few years ago, to be honest, using an iPod with iPod earphones I couldn't even tell the difference between FLAC/Apple Lossless/etc and 192Kbps mp3. So I'll save a heck of a lot of space converting 27GB of 192Kbps mp3's into 128Kpbs AACs.

So any idea what's causing the error?

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Answer 3

PT

Level 7

20,888 points

Sep 4, 2008 9:25 AM in response to markmc78

The only thing that comes to mind is perhaps one or more of the files have weird characters in the file name that give it trouble when it tries to write the file name to the disk? Although that is usually not an issue with Mac formatted volumes, but I have seen file names give error -50s when copying photos files to a Fat32 formatted drive. Although that was also outside of the iTunes environment.
Patrick

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Answer 4

markmc78 Author

Level 1

33 points

Sep 5, 2008 2:12 AM in response to PT

Nope. For example the album where tracks 11 & 12 wouldn't convert: track 11 is titled "The End Has No End". All other details (artist, album, genre, artwork, etc) are identical to tracks 1-12 & track 13. Yet track 11 wouldn't convert, throwing up the error message when the progress bar was about 25% of the way up, but tracks 1-10 and track 13 convert fine

Which leads me to another point that makes me think it can't be what you suggested - namely that track 11 fails about 25% of the way up the progress bar, yet track 12 fails AS SOON as I choose "Convert to AAC". If the problem was related to file name characters or whatever you'd expect both of them to fail at the same point, presuming iTunes writes name/tag information at the same point for every file (start or end I'd presume).

Thanks anyway. Anyone else got any ideas?

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Answer 5

PT

Level 7

20,888 points

Sep 5, 2008 7:54 AM in response to markmc78

One work around that comes to mind is you might try taking those troublesome songs, put them in a playlist and burn them out to an Audio CD. Then reimport them back into iTunes as AAC files.
Patrick

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