aacDECdrop not converting whole stream

[Genaugmen]

I've been having this problem converting an aac stream. I've used aacdecdrop for a while with good results usually. But there have been some times when I get a huge wav file from aacdecdrop (like 10GB), but the resulting wav file is only 1 hour and a few minutes (2-7mins) long. I've tried with a few other apps to produce the desired results but end up with the same length of audio (1 hour & 2-7mins) although file size might vary by a couple of gigs. I used one app (i don't remember which one), which did give me the full length of the audio track ,but the resulting wav file was stereo, not the 5.1 (6 channel) audio that I am trying to get. It seems like the only common factor where I run into this problem is that all of these aac streams have been well over 2 hours long.
What's going on here? Anybody have similar problems with some aac streams?

[midders]

One of the common audio encoders out there (unfortunately I can't remember which one off the top of my head) sometimes doesn't read the correct track length from the file header, so you need to tell it to keep processing until it reaches the end of the stream. Check the command line options for whichever tool is actually doing the conversion to see if this is the case.

For best quality AAC to AC3 conversion, use NeroAACDec to convert to wav and then eac3to to convert to AC3. This path also handles the channel remapping that is required.

The Nero tool doesn't work with elementary streams, so you can either use FAAD instead or YAMB and MP4Box to stick the AAC stream in an MP4 container before decoding.

Slainte

midders