m4a/MP3 issues

[Lib_F]

Hey all!

Just recently got myself an Acer Aspire One netbook running Linpus Lite and I'm having a little trouble with getting my music collection from my Vista laptop to play on the netbook.

As I was using iTunes on the laptop most of my music is in m4a format. I've tried to install both Banshee and VLC to the netbook, but I don't seem to be able to get either of them to play either m4a OR MP3, so I think I must've done something wrong...

Trying to play songs in Banshee results in the song and artist name swapping stupidly quickly on the top bar, but no music playing and I'm unable to do anything with Banshee at all unless I click on 'Radio' or 'Podcasts'.

Trying to play m4as in VLC doesn't happen full stop, and whilst it played on MP3 for a bit it now seems to just scroll along without any sound....

Any ideas what I'd done wrong? Probably going to try un-installing and re-installing when I get home from work tonight.

[reed9]

Banshee uses gstreamer as the backend. You may need to install some extra stuff for it to playback certain formats.

Look for these packages:
gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg
gstreamer0.10-ugly-plugins
gstreamer0.10-bad-plugins
gstreamer0.10-good-plugins

They may be named slightly different. I think Fedora (linpus is fedora based) doesn't include the 0.10 part.

You may also need to enable the rpmfusion repository to get some of these packages.

I would install plain old ffmpeg as well.

[Lib_F]

I've checked and I have the following installed:

gstreamer-plugins-good/farsight/base
gstreamer-tools

Removing Banshee and adding it again doesn't seem to have helped... Songs seem to be getting added to the library but I can't view the library or play songs, and the really rapid scrolling between song name, song artist and 'Banshee' is still happening on the title bar.

[reed9]

The rapid scrolling is most likely because it can't play the songs, so it just scrolls through to the next.

Did you try installing the gstreamer packages I mentioned?

[Lib_F]

The rapid scrolling is most likely because it can't play the songs, so it just scrolls through to the next.

Did you try installing the gstreamer packages I mentioned?

They don't show up in my add/remove database, and the rpmfusion repository doesn't have an option for Fedora 8, which I think Linpus is based on, and the .rpm file for Fedora 10 won't install. :S

[reed9]

Ah, hell, I guess they dropped support for Fedora 8. I believe they maintain an archive for older releases, but I really don't know. Perhaps someone who knows more about Fedora can help out.

If at all possible, I would recommend updating to a real linux distribution. You might look at Easy Peasy.

[Lib_F]

Ah, hell, I guess they dropped support for Fedora 8. I believe they maintain an archive for older releases, but I really don't know. Perhaps someone who knows more about Fedora can help out.

If at all possible, I would recommend updating to a real linux distribution. You might look at Easy Peasy.

Thanks for your help! A bit of googling around and I managed to find Fluendo has shop which lets you download the gstreamer bits and pieces that are needed, so Banshee will now play mp3s for me. Wants me to pay 28 Euros to be able to play my m4as though, so still not quite what I'm after!