Amarok has to be built with support from external libraries for m4a tag writing support to work.


What does that mean?

Ian Monroe said it on a post on this thread:

http://amarok.kde.org/forum/index.php/t ... 324.0.html

Should support for m4a tag writing work, If I download the source and configure/make it with the following options:

  $ ./configure --enable-mysql --with-helix --with-libnjb --with-libgpod --with-mp4v2 --with-ifp

Like other users on the thread, which seems to have no successful conclusion, my version of Amarok does not allow modification of the Genre tag on .m4a files.  I've used both the kubunu (7.04) supplied version 1.4.5 and a freshly compiled version of 1.4.5 and both give the tag edit error.  File plays fine, but the Genre tag is blank, which means, of course, that the files don't show up in the right place in the Collection browser.

I am also trying to get m4a tagging support in amarok and there are quite a few others on the ubuntuforums that also have this problem. were you able to figure this out? does anybody know if m4a tagging will be supported in a future release (amarok 2?) or what is planned for it?
yes, i know we all can't stand proprietary formats, but unfortunately they got on my computer somehow and rather than convert them (and loss quality or compression ratio in the process...) it would be nice if they could "just work"...

Sometime after the point in time that m4a tagging was added, it was discovered that the files being retagged would stop playing on ipods and no one could figure out why except that it was probably mp4V2.  So rather than trash everybody's library, write support was disabled by default, and m4a read capability was added internally through a taglib plugin.  If you want to enable write support , you have to ./configure with --with-mp4v2 and have the faad2 and mp4V2 libraries installed.  faad2/mp4V2 is not needed for reading m4a tags.

But you have been warned.  You could damage your files.

Is it a plan to have future builds make this seamless?  I am a paitent man:  I would rather install through packages (ubuntu debian in my case0 so that upgrading doesn't become a nightmare.  Such things have happened, albeit not with amarok.

That's not really in our hands, but rather in the hands of the packagers. Please ask your specific distro's dudes for including support for the feature.