xmms + aac (m4a,etc)
 

A friend sent me an unencrypted m4a file that he ripped but it doesn't play in XMMS. I've looked on the net but haven't been able to peice togther how to make the AAC support work..

Can anyone explain in english?

(XMMS 1.2.1 on debian testing)

thanks!

http://www.xmms.org/plugins.php?category=input

there's like 2 different ACC plugins available.

aha, thanks, for some reason i was looking under output at that site...

thanks!

The two plugins mentioned there are fairly outdated in the meantime, but there is a rather new binary of the one developed by ciberfred at http://www.rarewares.org/debian.html although I'm not sure if it works. Usually the RareWares Debian maintainer xmixahlx will have a look at it if you ask him.

I summarized the current situation of the AAC/MP4 plugins at the XMMS forum, because the available information there was outdated, too:

http://forum.xmms.org/viewtopic.php?p=3246

In short: source code of the working plugin (decoding *.mp4, *.m4a and *.aac files, also with HE AAC profile) is included in the FAAD2 package from Audiocoding.com, binary is available from the Debian page on RareWares.org or other RPM maintainers (search with rpmseek.com etc.).

don't know what distro you're using, but if you're using an older distro (i'm using redhat 7.3) building and compiling the latest faad2 from source tarball is a pain in the tush. it wouldn't bootstrap and kept generating an error at some line when doing a ./configure. if you are using an older distro, i'd recommend getting the source rpm of the rc3 version in which i was able to rebuild the source rpm with no problems. use this command to get it built with the xmms plugin:

rpm --rebuild --with xmms faad2*.src.rpm

you can get that from sourceforge, here: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/f...c.rpm?download

if you want to install faac, i couldn't get it to configure either due to autoconf not being a recent enough version. i ended up finding rpms from dag wiers that work, even though they say they're for redhat 8.0. you can get those from here:

http://dag.wieers.com/packages/faac/

i ended up downloading version 1.23.5-1 of both the faac rpm and the faac-devel rpm.

those are able to be installed using the standard:

rpm -ivh faac*.rpm

Thanks for your tips concerning older versions vs. new ones. But you didn't specify what "latest FAAD2 source tarball" you used. There is the release 2.0 which has a known bug with spaces vs. tabs in the makefile - d'oh! This has been fixed in the CVS shortly after the release, so the weekly snapshots available at http://faac.sourceforge.net/modules/mydownloads/ should work concerning this issue at least. Or did you already try them, too? The XMMS plugin (and the one for MPEG4IP) now uses another library for MP4 file reading, so it's probably important to use rather these new tarballs than the older release.

And concerning FAAC using the latest version of autoconf and other install tools you're probably right, but I'm not a Linux user at all, so I only know that this might be a problem with older distributions. Furthermore there are most recent RPMs of FAAC v1.24 available if you use search engines like http://www.rpmseek.com/ or http://rpm.pbone.net/ for several distributions and architectures.

By the way, the usual URL http://www.audiocoding.com/ is not working since yesterday, because the site is moving to a new and faster server. But if you would like to read through the new forum or Wiki, you can access them with the older (original) link to the homepage: http://faac.sourceforge.net/

The old forum with lots of bug reports and fixes for compiling questions is also still available at http://faac.sourceforge.net/oldsite/phorum/

tried the latest cvs version of faad2 and that one wouldn't bootstrap either and autoreconf didn't work either. the version i tried was from here.

http://sourceforge.net/project/showf...ckage_id=85086

tried 2.0 final first ( the top link listed as either .tar.gz or .zip ) and the latest cvs version which as stated before, both didn't work. ended up going with the rc3 source rpm version. i'm thinking this could also be some kind of autoconf issue or something, but i don't really know and rc3 is working just peachy.

FAAC v1.24 was released on April 23, 2004. Before that there were several changes mainly related to MP4 tagging (different switches etc.), so if your RPM can already tag MP4 files fine, you probably don't need a newer one. Glad to hear that you are satisfied with the older FAAD2 version, too.

I got the plugin to work--I'm using Slack 10.0 what I did was get the latest cvs source from:

:pserver:anonymous@cvs.audiocoding.com:/cvsroot/faac

and then:
autoreconf -vif
./configure --with-mp4v2 --with-xmms

I had a problem with xmms finding libfaad.so.0 because i think it was looking in /usr/lib instead of /usr/local/lib which is where libfaad was installed to. You could prob. fix this by using --prefix=/usr on the config script. I just copied libfaad* and libmp4* to /usr/lib and it works fine for me.

hope this helps!

Alan

Thanks for the hint, it would be great if you also mention it on the Audiocoding.com forum when the site is working again, so that Menno could add it to the CVS. By the way, I don't know either why the new site is down at the moment, maybe server problems. So downloading the latest CVS snapshot of FAAD2 from Sep 16, 2004 isn't possible, but it would also include the new XMMS plugin from Aug 22, 2004.

i couldn't get to the website either but I could still access the cvs server just 2 days ago. odd.

one note on my above tip, if you copy the files over fron one lib dir to the other, the symlinks will be wrong and your system will complain on bootup. just fix these and you'll be all set.

alan

The homepage is up again since a few hours. It's not hosted on SourceForge any longer (except for the /oldsite/ stuff), so that's why there can be differences in availability.