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[666JackTheKnife666]

I have been having no luck converting some M4b files to mp3.
clicking the convert button comes back pretty much instantly as finished and the details show that the conversion has failed.
I have reinstalled QuickTime as an attempt to correct the issue but no luck. Is there any thing else I can try ?
The m4b files that i have tried to convert all play with out errors, though i don't have any other means to test the integrity of the files I wish to convert.
Any idea's ?

[666JackTheKnife666]

For others who have the same problems I have found a work around.
audacity is a free(open source) audio recording & editing app that has the ability to save to various file formats.
get it here http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
Depending on what kind of files your working with you may also need to download various codec's, the web site for audacity has links for them.
It's a shame I have to use an external utility when this functionality is supposedly a feature of MC.
regardless audacity works.
 

[666JackTheKnife666]

just a little more information on the problem I am having using the convert format functionality in MC.

I have tried to convert the m4b file to every available file format they all do exactly the same. Click the convert button immediately finished and details say failed, even the convert to wav fails.
how can i verify MC's encoders/decoders are properly set up ? I can play files alright so the decoders seem fine.
is there a log file i can look at to see what is happening ?

[glynor]

Change the file extension to M4A (or MP4) and try it again.

M4B, M4A, M4V, M4P, and all the other M4? extensions are really just MP4 files for specific purposes.  There is no technical difference in the container format between a video MP4 file (which Apple calls "m4v"), an Audiobook MP4 (which Apple calls "m4b"), and a music MP4 (which Apple calls "m4a").  They're all just "misnamed" MP4s.

MC knows how to convert audio MP4s to MP3 or WAV (or whatever), it just apparently doesn't know about the special "m4b" extension.

[glynor]

PS.  If only Apple had decided to leave the file extensions alone and implemented a nice [Media Sub Type] tagging scheme of some kind, then we wouldn't have this mess.  But, they probably didn't want to listen to people whine that they wanted to add their own "types" to the Media Sub Type field.

They ended up doing it anyway (iTunes has a "Media Type" field), but they didn't implement it in the tags.

[666JackTheKnife666]

Sry it's taken me so long to get back to this issue RL stuff intruded anyway I changed the extention to mp4 as suggested. MC now believes that the file is some kind of video content and my conversion options are all various video formats, there are now options for things like wav or mp3 etc.
Not sure what else to try.
thx for your help.