AAC/MP4/m4a audio problems

**TauLepton** · 09-01-2005

I've got a lot of music on my gentoo partition that was originally ripped using iTunes on a powerbook g4. About half of it is *.m4a files. I've installed mplayer, xmms, and faad2. when I use mplayer from the command line to play a song, it displays about a million "FAAD: Failed to decode frame: Pulse coding not allowed in short blocks" errors, probably one error for every frame. xmms also won't play the *.m4a files, but it doesn't give any useful errors. Who's to blame: mplayer, faad, iTunes, or me? And how do I fix it?

edit: There's no DRM on any of the music, as far as I know.

**lakerdonald** · 09-01-2005

You can try converting to mp3 or ogg with lame.

**TauLepton** · 09-02-2005

I would do that except that I can't get them from m4a to wav. Is there any way to do that that doesn't involve using mplayer? Better yet, how could I tell it to use faac instead of faad2? I think faad2 is failing to decode these files.

**lakerdonald** · 09-05-2005

lame has nothing to do with mplayer...it can convert from m4a to mp3 easily.

**TauLepton** · 09-06-2005

lame produces mp3s that sound like static. I've tried these two commands:

Code:

lame "01 1-Prison Song.m4a" "prison-song.mp3"
lame -x "01 1-Prison Song.m4a" "prison-song.mp3"   #The songs came off of an HFS+ formatted iPod, so maybe there were endian issues?

Can I be missing some step in setting up the AAC libraries? I'm a newbie, so no solution is too obvious to mention. By the way, last night I installed Debian on my other partition. Noatun on Debian will play all my m4a music with no problem.

**TauLepton** · 09-11-2005

Well, I upgraded mplayer to version 1.0-pre7-r1, along with some of its dependencies, and now mplayer will play m4a files. Is there any way now to add them to my amarok library, with all of their metadata intact?

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