To this day I have not successfully implemented AAC/Mp4 playback on any of my linux systems. I've had no problem getting musepack,mp3,ogg,flac and all the other formats in the rainbow but the ability to read my nero/itunes generated m4a files eludes me. This has been a problem for me on Suse, Ubuntu and Debian. I have attempted to install the appropriate libraries and plugins on each platform but either the packages won't install or when they do install they just don't work.

Specifics:
Ultimately I would like gstreamer support and I have tracked down the faad gstreamer plugin in the unofficial repositories. With it I have included libfaad (all variants) and even libmp4v2 and mp4ip (mutually exclusive of course). No combination has been successful for me. Rhythmbox won't even recognize my m4a files... (i havent tried using a different extension... will try that and follow up).

I have also attempted to use beep media player instead using its own mp4 plugin however while I am able to load my m4a files into the playlist they simply wont play (no error message, simply nothing happens). This leads me to believe its a problem with the library dependencies (wrong version? broken?).

I have also looked at trying lamip however the debian packages don't seem to work in Sarge stable for obvious reasons and I am desparately trying to avoid using source in an attempt to keep my package management consistent, although ultimately I may have to change this policy.

So what I really need is first of all maybe a suggestion into what I'm missing or doing wrong, but ultimately, maybe URLs for good debian repositories that will work with Sarge stable, or maybe just some websites hosting the specific files i need. I have clearly confused myself regarding which versions of which libraries I need. Are there any case study examples of people here who have gotten m4a files to play succesffuly? What did you do?

This problem has been haunting me for months and im desparate for an answer. Thanks.

Have you tried VLC yet ? It plays almost anything.
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

Dirk.

Yes, and that does work however it is not very graceful as an audio player. I suppose it can work as an interim solution however it still doesnt satisfy that burning frustration.

aac/mp4 playback packages have been in rarewares for ~2 years now... so...

also, lamip packages will be re-packaged once 0.0.3 goes final. (actually, all of rarewares will be repackaged now that the C++ shit is settling down...)

however, rarewares is built against SID so you'll either need to dist-upgrade or compile from source yourself.

all my source is at http://xmixahlx.dyndns.org/debian/


later

I can play m4a files fine with Amarok which is using Gstreamer engine. I have Gentoo Linux. Amarok can't display the tags and it doesn't read m4a filest to the database, but it seems like it's going to be fixed in near future.

Sounds like i should just upgrade to Sid. I will do that tongiht if i have time and see if that helps. Thanks

For the sake of completeness I wanted to make one more post to this thread since I have resolved all of my aac woes. I was on the right track when I decided to upgrade to SID but ultimately I abandoned that effort because of some broken packages that surfaced while doing a dist-upgrade. Instead I went back to Ubuntu, using the new Testing distro (Breezy Badger) hoping their testing packages would be a little more stable than Debain testing/unstable. Ultimately my solution was to utilize a method called apt-pinning which allowed me to stagger and prioritize repositories from both the stable distro(Hoary) and testing(Breezy), combined with some other developmental repositories I now had access to all the packages I needed without any dependency problems. Gstreamer-FAAD went on without incident as well as a boatload of other packages I had previously had issues with (Beagle, Mono, etc). So now I am happily listening to my entire music collection in rhythmbox on my Ubuntu powered laptop. Thanks for the suggestions everyone.