Has anyone gotten Songbird to play m4a files in Slackware? Is so, 'fess up! Songbird forums say this is possible in Linux with the right codec yet most in the forums, including me, fail. (There's also a plugin that doesn't work in linux.) All my other players handle m4a fine in Slackware 13, so I know I've got the proper codec.

Hmm.Songbird playing m4a files here on slack 13 64bit.I didn't have to do anything exotic to make it work.Im not sure what songbird uses as a backend whether its ffmpeg,xine or gstreamer all of which I had previously installed.I usually convert my m4a files to mp3 using pacpl so I can put them on my mp3 player.Cheers.

Thanks, hoodooman. What method did you use to install Songbird?

Well, Nevermind! Did some more digging and turns out that Songbird m4a playback depends on gstreamer 'bad' collection. Interesting thing is that I already gst-plugins-bad installed via SBo. So I reinstalled the package. No go. Double checked the SBo GPG - fine. So then I removed the source from cache (via SBo) and reinstalled again forcing new source download. Eureka!

I can't seem to get pacpl working. Did you use the Slackware package from their site?

By the way, I removed gst-bad and build it again (SBo) and installed it, but still no m4a playback...

This website helped me troubleshoot the m4a problem:
http://wiki.songbirdnest.com/Develop...Streamer_Setup
Note particularly the Playback Problems section - run gstreamer natively to see the error messages.

Hi DonnieP.I didn't actually install songbird.I downloaded the precompiled 64 bit package from their website and I have it in my home directory.I just launch it from there.To reply to adrive re the pacpl application,I didn't use the slackware package.I used the source package where the INSTALL file there told me the perl modules required before building.Also in the source package is a script in /extra called mod-install.sh which will download and build the required modules.

Just for the record, I finally figured out what's going on with the SBo gst-plugins-bad package when I tried installing it on a different PC. The package script (and the underlying source for that matter) assume you have all codec dependency libraries installed without telling you what the dependencies are or even stopping the build when when one is missed - it just marches merrily along and skips any plugin for which it can't find the dependent library. The way you determine which plugins didn't build (besides your apps not working) is to go back and inspect the build log where the script does document which plugins didn't get built. Now that I've inspected that log I'm not sure how useful this package really is since more plugins don't get built than do, even though it completes "successfully." Said another way, there's no point in installing this package until you've perused the gstreamer website thoroughly.