SongKong Jaikoz

SongKong and Jaikoz Music Tagger Community Forum

Converting an mp3 collection into m4a

Hi Paul,
I hope you are well. One task that I am planning for 2025 is to potentially convert the existing mp3 music & classic collection to m4a (likely with XRecode 3). Before I start that I wanted to get your opinion on the following: Generally one would reencode from source rather than convert from mp3 to m4a. However, I just dont know yet how to best leverage SongKong & Jaikoz to help me to benefit from the following 3 potential advantages m4a would have:

  1. How do I auto populate lyrics (SK & JK do not currently support it as far as I can see, does it ever make sense as a feature for your roadmap or d you know a good 3rd party software for that)
  2. how do I improve embedded m4a albumart (instead of the existing separate mp3 + jpg files) ,
  3. How do I really benefit from the additional m4a meta tag improvements vs mp3? Therefore, do you think if space saving alone does not really cut it for me is this is an endevour worth doing? Your expert opinion is very much appreciated and maybe you can share whether you migrated your collection to m4a or possibly something else? Best regards

Hi, m4a has none of these advantages over mp3s. Mp3 are perfectly capableof storing lyrics, embedded artwork and any metadata that can be stored by m4a.

The advantage of mp4a over mp3 is they can be encoded as lossless, but this is only possible if you are re-encoding from original source rather than Mp3. Alternatives are Flac, Dsf and Aif but if you are on MacOS then Flac is not well supported.

Thank you very much Paul, in that case I wont spend the effort to convert as I am not interested in lossless. Have a good week!

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