Reposting this separate thread here as a possible bug. The more I think about it, this has to be an issue that can be resolved - either with advice from the development team (which I would certainly welcome, thanks) or as an issue to be opened and addressed in a subsequent MC version.
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Handheld sync and m4a files - "File not supported"
I bought my first Android handheld this week - the Vastking M10. It's nice and wasn't too expensive.
I "became a developer" (required by Android 11 for USB transfer), set up its USB port for file transfer, the unit showed up in Explorer (Windows 10) and in MC 28.0.66, and have used the MC to sync some songs to it. And it works, to a certain extent.
My music tracks are a mix of .mp3 and .m4a files. When I choose Options->Conversion->Audio->Mode as "Original", the Status for all the .m4a files changes to "File not supported", and if I go ahead and sync with those options, I get the popup "Confirm Action" dialog that says those files cannot be transferred due to "...unsupported file types".
Fair enough, I suppose, although these same .m4a tracks play just fine in MC28 itself, and if I click on one of them in File Explorer Groove Music will launch and play the track, and if I manually copy an .m4a file to the handheld, it plays fine there too. So it's unclear to me at which point the file format is "unsupported".
If I choose the Conversion option to "Specified output format only when necessary", and specify MP3 as the encoder, the Status for those tracks changes to "In Queue" (good) and when I sync, the conversion is performed (also good), but on the handheld the cover art for those tracks has disappeared (very, very bad). This happens no matter which option I choose under "Cover Art" - it seems that "No Change" would retain the existing cover art, right? But that doesn't work for me.
I haven't tested all the other encoder types, but my questions here are (a) am I doing something wrong, and (b) why do I have to do any conversion on a file type that appears to be supported, but MC flags as unsupported? If I could sync both .mp3 and .m4a files to the handheld, I'd likely not lose any cover art. But I haven't found a way to do it.
Thanks
ncjay