# Alternative to reading m4a files

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/alternative-to-reading-m4a-files/39194>\
**Category:** General Usage\
**Created:** [May 9, 2020, 7:34pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/alternative-to-reading-m4a-files/39194 "2020-05-09T19:34:07Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![bafonso](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/bafonso/32/7109_2.png) [@bafonso](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/bafonso)\
**Post date:** [May 9, 2020, 7:34pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/alternative-to-reading-m4a-files/39194/1 "2020-05-09T19:34:07Z")

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I am currently having another go at Julia and decided to do a small project working on audio data. Currently running into the situation of not being able to read m4a files. These are coming from my OSX setup and I am doing all my julia stuff on my ml linux box. I understand libsndfile (@ssfrr) will not read these so I am wondering what is the best format to have these saved in python? I know I read these files python and export them into different formats. Is wav my best approach? I’d rather use a compressed format but still being able to load it as audio-esque files, as I would want to perform MFCC, etc. I guess I am aiming to as much audio manipulation as possible in Julia.

For starters, I was currently thinking of saving them all as wav 22khz stereo files and loading these up in Julia, anyone else have other suggestions? 🙂

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**Author:** ![rdeits](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/rdeits/32/286_2.png) [@rdeits](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/rdeits)\
**Post date:** [May 9, 2020, 8:26pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/alternative-to-reading-m4a-files/39194/2 "2020-05-09T20:26:50Z")

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I’ve used [GitHub - dancasimiro/WAV.jl: Julia package for working with WAV files](https://github.com/dancasimiro/WAV.jl) successfully in the past, but I’d be curious to hear if other people have had success with compressed audio.

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**Author:** ![ssfrr](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/ssfrr/32/3736_2.png) [@ssfrr](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/ssfrr)\
**Post date:** [May 9, 2020, 11:53pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/alternative-to-reading-m4a-files/39194/3 "2020-05-09T23:53:51Z")

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For most of my audio analysis work I use FLAC files because they’re compressed but lossless. They’re supported by LibSndFile.jl.

There’s a list if supported file types here:

> <https://github.com/JuliaAudio/LibSndFile.jl/blob/master/README.md#supported-formats>

If you want loss compression Ogg Vorbis is a good option.