m4aread - read MPEG4 (AAC or M4A) compressed audio files

Version 1.4.0.0 (146 KB) by Dan Ellis
m4aread reads m4a or aac compressed audio files just like wavread reads uncompressed audio files
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4.7K Downloads
Updated 9 Sep 2011

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m4aread provides a drop-in replacement for wavread when the audio files are compressed using MPEG4 audio (AAC or M4A) format. (Protected m4p files cannot be decoded, unfortunately.)

All the work is done by the external "faad" binary, an open-source AAC decoder available for multiple platforms. Matlab File Exchange precludes posting binaries, but binaries for MACI64, GLNXA64, and Windows, can be downloaded from http://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/resources/matlab/m4aread/ .

faad can extract the audio from an mp4 format video, so you can also read these files directly with m4aread.

This is based on my mp3read code.

Cite As

Dan Ellis (2024). m4aread - read MPEG4 (AAC or M4A) compressed audio files (https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/28745-m4aread-read-mpeg4-aac-or-m4a-compressed-audio-files), MATLAB Central File Exchange. Retrieved .

MATLAB Release Compatibility
Created with R2010a
Compatible with any release
Platform Compatibility
Windows macOS Linux

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m4aread/

Version Published Release Notes
1.4.0.0

Added support for reading excerpts from very large files without excessive memory usage.
1.3.0.0

The code is updated to support the FORCEMONO and DOWNSAMPLE options that were introduced in mp3read.

I removed the previously-included binaries to comply with MFE policy.
1.2.0.0

m4aread has been extended to support the FORCEMONO and DOWNSAMPLE flags exactly as defined for the parallel function mp3read.m.
1.1.0.0

No change to files, but noted in description that it can also pull audio directly from mp4 movie files.
1.0.0.0