Linking to aac audio files is returning a 404

Question

I have a lot of audio backed up on 1&1 (a web host), as I have a ridiculously large amount of cheap space left over after my websites.

I uploaded these through Wise-FTP directly to my webspace in Binary mode.

I have found that downloading my mp3 files through a browser link work fine, however aac files retrieve nothing more than a 404.

I have tested this with IE, FF and Chrome, but at the end of the day, a 404 is a 404 regardless of browser.

I could convert my aac files to mp3s but would prefer not to. I can find no indication of this on the 1&1 website faqs, and was wondering if anyone could fathom why this would be happening.

Answer 1

I suspect this may be a problem with your web server configuration.
If the files are on the server, you shouldn't get a 404 response but it's possible that the server is configured to not serve .aac files and to return an (erroneous) 404 page (or that something similar is happening on a proxy between you and the server).
You could try changing the file extension to .m4a and see if you have better luck - the file should still open in your music player if it does download.

Answer 2

I suspected it's a mimetype issue. If you can set them with 1&1, the AAC mimetype should be "audio/aac" or "audio/x-aac".