from the desk of stinkpot

get aac playback working in squeezeboxcenter in debian

November 10th, 2009 by Lawrence David

upgraded from squeezebox center 7.1 to 7.4 today and my aac playback broke.

to fix, i had to add the following lines to my convert.conf file:

mov mp3 * *
# FB:{BITRATE=-B %B}
[faad] -w -f 2 $FILE$ | [lame] –resample 44100 –silent -q $QUALITY$ $BITRATE$ -x -r – -

mov wav * *
# F
[faad] -w -f 2 $FILE$

mp4 mp3 * *
# FB:{BITRATE=-B %B}
[faad] -w -f 2 $FILE$ | [lame] –resample 44100 –silent -q $QUALITY$ $BITRATE$ -x -r – -

aac mp3 * *
# FB:{BITRATE=-B %B}
[faad] -w -f 2 $FILE$ | [lame] –resample 44100 –silent -q $QUALITY$ $BITRATE$ -x -r – -

aac playback still wasn’t working, so i went to:

settings -> advanced ->logging

and enabled “debug” logging for player.source.

parsing the logfile output revealed the following line:

[09-11-10 21:20:08.1582] Slim::Player::Song::open (548) Tokenized command “/usr/share/squeezeboxserver/Bin/i386-linux/faad” -w -f 2 “/home/lad/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/A Fine Frenzy/One Cell In The Sea/04 You Picked Me 1.m4a” | “/usr/local/bin/lame” –resample 44100 –silent -q 9 -B 320 -x -r – - & |

strangely, trying to execute:

> /usr/share/squeezeboxserver/Bin/i386-linux/faad

led to an error where linux claimed the file faad didn’t exist.  removing the faad file from /usr/share/squeezeboxserver/Bin/i386-linux/ caused squeezebox center to search for faad in the default linux location (/usr/bin).

i reloaded and suddenly, angels sang.

Posted in Unix | 4 Comments »

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4 Responses to “get aac playback working in squeezeboxcenter in debian”

1. on 05 Dec 2009 at 7:03 am   Philip Craig

   The reason it claimed the files don’t exist is that they are 32 bit binaries. Which of course squeeze should check it has the libs for, but doesn’t.

   To get these to work you need to:

   sudo aptitude install ia32-libs

2. on 30 Sep 2010 at 8:05 am   Superkikim

   FINALLY !!!

   Thank you You helped me a lot I just had some more adjustment to make

   1st of all, instead of just deleting the file

   /usr/share/squeezeboxserver/Bin/i386-linux/faad

   I made a symbolic link to /usr/bin/faad

   rm /usr/share/squeezeboxserver/Bin/i386-linux/faad
   ln -s /usr/bin/faad /usr/share/squeezeboxserver/Bin/i386-linux/faad

   Then I had also to install flac:

   apt-get install flac

   and finally to repeat the symbolic link operation to flac

   rm /usr/share/squeezeboxserver/Bin/i386-linux/flac
   ln -s /usr/bin/flac /usr/share/squeezeboxserver/Bin/i386-linux

   and magic… It finally works

3. on 04 Sep 2011 at 7:21 am   Neil

   Belated thanks for this. Helped me out with exact same problem – well to get BBCiPlayer aac streams to work.

4. on 29 Dec 2015 at 2:23 pm   Tony in Canberra

   Five years later and just found this post which has allowed me to fix my issue with a new install of Logitech Media Server on Ubuntu Server 14.04 refusing to play any aac streams.

   rm /usr/share/squeezeboxserver/Bin/i386-linux/faad
   ln -s /usr/bin/faad /usr/share/squeezeboxserver/Bin/i386-linux/faad

   Thank you!