hi,

I installed faac via yum, but amarok still doesn\'t play aac files from itunes.
im using gstreamer as the audio engine.

Gstreamer needs a plugin to play aac file, just the library for it isn\'t enough.

well, I installed this plugin now, but amarok still crashes when im opening a folder which contains aac files

okay, now it doesn\'t crash anymore.

i installed the faad and faac plugin for gstreamer, did a gst-register but amarok still can\'t play aac (.m4a) files.

These are DRM-free files from iTunes?

Is xine an option?

yes, they are DRM free! I ripped them myself with itunes.
if you can tell me how to get aac support for xine then its an option for sure.

I assume you mean that it doesn\'t currently? Its just a manner of compiling it with faad support or downloading a full-featured binary of xine. Assuming I\'m not mistaken. I can play the movie previews on Apple\'s site with xine, and I think they use AAC audio.

well I istalled xine-libs and devel via yum but i still can\'t play aac files with amarok if I choose the xine-engine.
i\'ll try to recompile xine myself, maybe the rpms don\'t work correctly.

well. maybe I found out something new. After switching back from xine to gstreamer amarok crashes at startup with following error:

amarok: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib64/gstreamer-0.8/libgstfaad.so: undefined symbol: NeAACDecOpen

That happens when a binary is executed with libraries it wasn\'t compiled for.

and what does that mean for me concretely?

You installed a package incompatible with another package at some point.

I\'ll refrain from making \"gentoo rulez\" remarks.

undefined symbol: NeAACDecOpen

The FAAD2 library was renamed to NeAAC (for Nero) some months ago, so it seems that gstreamer and/or its FAAD2 plugin uses an old version. The same might be true for the Xine library.

Concerning your initial problem: did you try to simply rename your iTunes files to *.mp4? This is another issue with Xine and gstreamer AAC/MP4 support, as far as I remember. The fix would be very easy, because an audio-only *.mp4 file is the same as an *.m4a file. There might be a difference with additional BIFS and OD tracks (used for MPEG-4 Systems and/or ISMA support) in the MP4 container, but not for iTunes (or FAAC) *.m4a files, because it doesn\'t add these tracks, as far as I know (QuickTime would).

I actually looked into this last week and submitted a bug report. It was a small bug in the xine library that it didn\'t consider that it could play .m4a files even though it can. I believe they\'ve fixed this so the next version of xinelib will play .m4a files in amaroK without trouble.

Looking at the amaroK gstreamer engine code, it looks like it actually tests whether gstreamer can play the file so I wouldn\'t think the extension would be important for that. Though I could be wrong.

I believe they\'ve fixed this so the next version of xinelib will play .m4a files in amaroK without trouble.

Great... by the way, *.m4b files are just the same as *.m4a, the only difference is that they are bookmarkable in iTunes and on the iPod, because this file extension is used for audio books. That way you can start at the same position after stopping somewhere in these rather long files. FAAC supports encoding to *.m4b directly, and libfaad can be used for decoding, too, although this file extension isn\'t listed yet.

Do you know if amaroK is able to play Shoutcast/Icecast2 streams already? Then it would be possible to decode the aacPlus streams from radio stations listed on http://www.tuner2.com/ with FAAD2. Or does this depends on the gstreamer and Xine libraries, too?