Mediocrates
Member
Yeah, but probably the right thing to do is to go back to my original (mostly ripped from CDs) AIFF files and convert 'em to M4A (which is what you originally suggested).
In fact, if the issue is that WAV files don't have the tags (for album, artist, etc) then M4A converted from WAV probably won't either.
I need to live with just being able to select artists (by tapping "Folder"), or redo a fair amount of work.
AIFF is another container format, which is very similar to WAV in that it is generally used for uncompressed audio. AIFF has generally been used in the Apple world, whereas WAV has generally been used in the PC/Windows world. What you already ripped to AIFF (which might be uncompressed audio) may include tags, so converting from AIFF to another container might preserve/convert the tags as well, but I'm not sure what ITunes will do.
Keep in mind that M4A is also a container format, so "converting" from AIFF to M4A doesn't inherently change the format of the audio. However, in the common usage of the iTunes world, I suspect that "converting to M4A" implies converting the audio to AAC, since the typical user isn't going to understand (or care about) the concept of a container versus an audio format. AAC is a compressed and lossy format, similar to MP3. If you configure iTunes to perform a lossless conversion/compression, I think it will use ALAC, which is Apple's lossless format (similar to FLAC). I don't think the Tesla media player supports ALAC.
If you end up having to go through the gruntwork of converting formats to generate new files for Tesla playback, then you might as well convert the audio to AAC or MP3. If you do either at the highest quality available, it's highly unlikely you'll be able to hear the difference.