Does itunes support m4a files?

The music is m4a and windows doesn't seem to recognise it.

The file extension .m4a is used for two audio formats: AAC and Apple Lossless.

Not sure what player you were using on Windows, but AAC support is much more common than Apple Lossless. However, iTunes on Windows will support both.

Generally, yes.

(99048)

.m4a can be AAC (lossey) or Apple Lossless aka. ALAC which as its name suggests is a lossless format.

Both use the same file extension and tag format. Any .m4a file is not protected by DRM.

Windows Media Player since Windows7 has supported AAC as standard but still does not support Apple Lossless as standard. However it is possible to install a directshow filter which can play both in WMP.

Unfortunately in their stupidity, Microsoft even though they are the same file extension, file format, and tag format and even though both can be played by WMP with this directshow filter, WMP specifically checks to see if it is Apple Lossless and then puts it in 'other' instead of 'music'.

Fortunately a developer has written a plugin for WMP to trick it to thinking Apple Lossless is the same as AAC and it then ends up in music as desired. As a result it can be played, can be put in the correct section and WMP even automatically recognises the meta-tags including embedded album artwork!

I have all my music in Apple Lossless and shared between iTunes, WMP and even Microsoft Media Center.

M4A files have aac audio content and mpeg ll video content as stills, or slides that come in on time markers. Online courses, language courses use them and just basically recommend iTunes to play them. This has some disadvantages as below:

M4a is native to Mac, iTunes and should play in Quicktime, but seems to be an orphaned file type and is poorly supported. I have a lot of lectures on online courses coming as m4a, with slides that play automatically with the teachers lecture. However Qucktime does not condescend to play my lectures or any of my movies and seems to be set up only to play purchesed movies from Apple. Also iTunes does play the slides, but only as a thumbnail and is sensitive-it disappears if you do anything.

It has taken me a year to find the solution and I want to share it. If I have maligned any Apple products, please correct me. The Apple App store provides

MPlayerX, an aftermarket and small mimic of Quicktime, similar to VLC Media Player. VLC does not play the slides, only the audio. MPlayerX will play the slides LARGE by default, but only if you make a small change to the file extension: from .m4a to m4v. Then it sees the slides as "video". FYI the way I use to do that is Control click/Get Info and use the File name and Extension field.

I recommend this because I can play these lectures, with slides large, access them easily and keep them out of my iTunes library and in fact on an slick not on my HDrive. Now I just want a way now to play them on my Android Tablet and I will be set.

If anyone has another method, please inform. I have found lots of people in similar position to me who can't get the slides to play. Chrome and Safari won't as far as I can tell. Roger

The type of file you are described does not sounds like a normal .m4a file which as previously mentioned is either a AAC or Apple Lossless music file. AAC is an official format and nothing specific to do with Apple. Obviously Apple Lossless is to do with Apple but is now an open-source format and even Microsoft support it as standard now in Windows 10.

The type of file you are describing sounds more like what is usually referred to as an 'enhanced podcast' file. This also uses the .m4a file extension usually and contains AAC audio, but also will contain slides like you describe. As the name might suggest podcasts and also enhanced podcasts date way back to the original iPods which had minuscule screens, as such any slide is correspondingly small as well. Therefore even if you manage to blow it up to full screen it is likely to be very low resolution.

This format is something that I believe Apple originally came up with and is most often associated with iTunes and the podcast feature in iTunes and I am not surprised you are struggling to find anything else to properly play it.

If these are from the iTunes University part of the iTunes Store then there is a dedicated iTunes U app, see Get the iTunes U App

This app can be used to play as well as create materials.

The following may be of a little help. http://www.abdn.ac.uk/library/myzone/podcasts/

It seems that for iTunes University material the usual approach is to use either iTunes or QuickTime Player on Mac or Windows, or the iTunes U app on iPhone or iPad.

Addendum

If you have added these enhanced podcasts and/or iTunes U files manually to your iTunes library rather than downloading them from within iTunes, then these files may not be correctly identified as non-music files. You can correct this by selecting the files in iTunes, then choosing Get Info, then clicking on the Options tab. You should then see a drop down menu called 'media kind'. Via this drop down menu you can then tell iTunes they are Podcast files or iTunes U files which will help it play them correctly.