Using Mac OS 9 as a HiFi music system

[greystash]

Hello,

After becoming increasingly frustrated with OSX I've revived my iMac G4 and set it up with OS 9.2.2. 

I mostly want to use the system for playing music from my network drive, I have it connected to an 8TB NAS drive with all my music on it. The problem is that all of my music is in the Apple Lossless format (m4a) and I can't find any music players that will recognise these files. 

Are there any music players that will play m4a files on OS9 or is there a better lossless format that OS9/iTunes 2.0.4 or other players can recognise? I would rather not convert all of my music to AIFF format as that tends to lose metadata and the files are much larger. 

Any ideas out there?

thanks!

 

[Daniël]

I think that for all lossless compressed audio formats, you're going to need OS X. Lossless didn't really started getting traction until well after OS 9 was declared dead by Steve Jobs himself. I'd install OS X 10.4 or 10.5 and then an audio application like VLC or the most recent version of iTunes (not sure if PPC iTunes can do lossless, the last version for Leopard probably should).

 

[Bunsen]

Consider some version of Linux or BSD?

 

[greystash]

Bugger that's a shame, I guess I'll stick with OSX then. Thanks for your replies!