music formats and iPod

[Kevin Brown]

>>>now that I've ripped 3000 songs from my cd's I'm beginning to wonder if
>>>I made a mistake by having the default format AAC (Apple's format).
>>>
>>>I can export the music using gtkpod but I can't see a plug-in for xmms
>>>that plays .m4a files (I presume that this is Apple's AAC) and I REALLY
>>>don't want to start over...It's taken me a long time to get this far.
>>>
>>>Any ideas about what is the best way to handle these things? 
>>
>>I believe that recent versions of Rhythmbox support AAC.
>>
>>http://www.gnome.org/projects/rhythmbox/
>>
>>But, they are using GStreamer, so any GStreamer based audio program 
>>should support them.  I don't think the GStreamer plugins for AAC are on 
>>all distros, you might have to find them for your's.
>>
> 
> ----
> OK I installed rhythmbox and it loads and looks fine. I can't get it to
> load my first test song that I exported from my iPod - Waiting.m4a
> (Santana)
> 
> Is m4a the right extension?

*nix doesn't really care about the extension.  Applications like XMMS, 
gstreamer, etc... should be able to figure out the decoder needed based 
on information in the header of each file.