BT Cloud .m4a

[shuffy]

Hi 

I have my music copied to BT Cloud and have discovered that some of the songs don't display album art and won't play. Delving a bit deeper it appears that Cloud doesn't support .m4a files, which is a bit of an inconvenience as over the years of using iTunes for my music I have a mix of MP3 and m4a files. 

Is this the case or am I missing something?

cheers

Steve

[NeilO]

@shuffy Thanks for posting, our BT cloud expert @JoeV should be able to answer this for you. He's not about at the moment but should be around during the week.

[JoeV · Accepted solution]

Hi @shuffy,

BT Cloud does support .m4a files. I suspect there's two different things going on here that are impacting you:

Missing Artwork

In order for BT Cloud to display artwork for uploaded music, the album artwork needs to be embedded into the music file itself. Music purchased from most digital stores already come like this, but if you used the 'Get Album Artwork' function within iTunes to add album artwork to your collection then the artwork actually gets stored in an 'iTunes album artwork' folder, rather than being directly embedded in the file. This is fine until you want to access the artwork with another program (like BT Cloud), as the third party program has no way of knowing which artwork goes with which song.

The solution is to use some third party software to embed artwork across your entire collection. I can't make any recommendations as to what to use, but a quick search should give you lots of freeware suggestions.

.m4a songs not playing back

BT Cloud isn't able to play back any songs protected by DRM, and I know that 'back in the day' iTunes used to serve up DRM'd .m4a files from the iTunes store. These won't play back in BT Cloud (or I suspect any non-apple software)

Hope this helps!

Joe