Take the 2-minute tour ×

I've looked and can't seem to find a concrete answer.

My client wants to play sound clips on his website, currently he has over 2000 clips which are in m4a format.

A lot of the audio players I have looked at say they support mp4 but no mention of m4a.

From the wiki on mp4 it says they are both the same except that m4a is a container for mp4 or something along those lines.

So my question is can i play m4a files with an mp4 player?

The alternative is for my client to convert all his files to mp3.

What's the best way forward?

share|improve this question

2 Answers 2

up vote 4 down vote accepted

Since we're talking about iPhones, the best way to go would be to use .m4a, being the native format iTunes uses for music. This was my initial thought, but I found you some material on the matter. (linked below)

"Besides the extension, absolutely nothing. Apple came up with extension to distiguish between files with Video and Audio (the MP4 extension) and files with Audio only (the M4A extension). As far as the internal structure of the file, nothing is different."

However, if you have already instructed your client to convert the files to .mp3, that will work perfectly as well! http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=AAC_FAQ

share|improve this answer

m4a is usually audio only, whereas mp4 contains audio and video streams.

There is no need to convert between formats, simply change the .m4a extension to .mp4 (or vice versa) and it will still play.

share|improve this answer

Your Answer


