"Did you have volume leveling enabled? It also re-encodes."

I tried turning it off and on, but it didn't work either way. I'd prefer it on, since I'd just reencode everything to ALAC before sending it over and get the advantage of nice stable volumes...

"It could be that do not correctly play non Zero padded Audio Data Chunk (Buffer)"

What does that mean? Is there some way to fix that?

Files do convert from AAC M4A to ALAC M4A in MediaMonkey - I just tried a couple. They play fine on the internal player, so the problem doesn't appear to be MM's ability convert to ALAC under normal circumstances. Is there something different happening when it converts prior to rendering?

This seems to be a MediaMonkey problem of some sort - MM threw the same error message when I was trying to render the ALAC file and the receiver wasn't on.

Hi,
re "occasional snapping noises": It could be that do not correctly play non Zero padded Audio Data Chunk (Buffer)

re AAC -> ALAC: It could be possible that AAC files uses strange format (Seen few in past). Do they Play in MediaMonkey and if you manually Convert them to ALAC do they work on Pioneer?

re WAV Metadata: There is a standard for WAV (According to RIFF Format) Metadata and it is called LIST INFO CHUNK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WAV#Metadata https://www.google.com/search?q=LIST+INFO+CHUNK and that format is Established around 1995 and more is explained at http://wavmetadata.blogspot.com/

Did you have volume leveling enabled? It also re-encodes.

I did check the settings. AAC files weren't set to auto-transcode there. FLAC was set to transcode to ALAC, because for some inexplicable reason my Pioneer has trouble rendering FLAC, but has no problem with ALAC. The FLAC transcodes seem to be working. No problems with MP3 files, either. Weird.

Here's a clue tho - I set [b]everything[/b] to transcode to WAV, and the problem stopped. So I think maybe this has something to do with the way the codec pack is utilized. If I set everything to transcode to ALAC, it also throws errors when it encounters AAC files. Shouldn't it be able to transcode from AAC to ALAC?

I'd just leave it set to transcode everything to WAV - it's hardwired over gigabit Ethernet so there's no shortage of bandwidth - but that results in occasional snapping noises during track transitions. From what I've seen, that's probably because MediaMonkey is trying to encode metadata into WAV files, for which there's no standard, and the receiver is treating it as audio data. Would be cool if the transcode settings for WAV files at least had a "strip metadata" option...

Verify the Auto-Conversion rules for the Media Server, it may accidentally be set to transcode. If that isn't the problem capture a debug log (step 4b) and attach it to a Support Ticket: https://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=69

OK, now I've got a weird error cropping up.

Whenever MM goes to render an M4A track on my receiver - which definitely supports M4A and which I'm not asking MediaMonkey to transcode - it's throwing a "MediaMonkey is unable to decode this format" error. I just bought and installed the Codec pack and it shows that it's installed, so I'm not sure why this wouldn't be working even if it *did* have to transcode, but it shouldn't.

If I retry the track 2-3 more times, eventually it actually does stream it over to my receiver. However, whatever MM is sending over before then seems to crash the DLNA receiver - it falls back to a server connect list. Once the file successfully streams, the receiver reports it's in "AAC" format (per the instruction manual, it treats .AAC, .M4A, .3GP, and .3G2 the same).

Any idea what the problem is?