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I have done some googling on this issue and come up with different answers and no clear direction.

I have some mp4/aac music files brought over from a Mac that I'd like to play in Linux. What tools/plugins are available to play mp4 files? Is it flac or faad2? I am confused by the difference. Are there plugins for any of the music players.

Also, how would one convert these files to mp3? I have found some mp4>wav>mp3 scripts out there but I was wondering what the TLLTS users do.

Thanks!

It is faad2 not FLAC. FLAC is a free opensource lossless audio codec. I know there is a plugin to beep-media-player for mp4 and vlc can play mp4's if faad2 is installed. As far as decoding I think "faad -o outfile.wav infile.mp4" should work based on the documentation though I havn't tried it yet. (I don't have any mp4 files)

When I was dealing with this issue, there was support for the playback, but no support for reading the tag info from iTunes created aac files in any player I looked at. XMMS may have been a different story, but I don't use xmms/beep. I ended up using itunes to re-encode all of my aacs - surprisingly, IMO the sound quality didn't suffer much, but then I'm not an audiophile either.

One thing to be aware of - iTunes encoded aacs with album art either crash audio players or have a god awful horrendous ~*SQWAK!!!*~ at the beginning of each song. You can strip the art with itunes or with easytag - I've done it with both, and both work just fine.

Thanks, guys. I've got faad2 installed and now I'm going to search for plugins for various media players. I tend to use xmms/beep so it sounds like I ought to be able to find something that will work.

Ideally, I will re-rip these files to mp3 directly rather than converting them to wav's and then re-encoding as mp3's. But knowing how to convert is a good fallback.

I use the MP4/AAC plugin with XMMS. It doesn't display the tags at all, but it plays the files without any problems.

I use amaroK with the xine engine enabled to play AAC files. It plays AAC files fine and I can convert them to mp3 or ogg easily if I want to. Xine and Kaffeine are the only media players that I know of that can read the tag info from an AAC file.

Ryochan7 wrote:Xine and Kaffeine are the only media players that I know of that can read the tag info from an AAC file.

Kaffeine is just a different frontend to Xine. Yes, xine is mostly used as a dvd player (with DVD menu support) but it also has fairly strong audio capabilities.

Patrick wrote:

Ryochan7 wrote:Xine and Kaffeine are the only media players that I know of that can read the tag info from an AAC file.

Kaffeine is just a different frontend to Xine. Yes, xine is mostly used as a dvd player (with DVD menu support) but it also has fairly strong audio capabilities.

Not true. You can chose from at least a few backends. While it's certainly true that *I* use the xine backend, Ubuntu and others of its ilk come with gstreamer as its backend by default.

Snarkout wrote: Not true. You can chose from at least a few backends. While it's certainly true that *I* use the xine backend, Ubuntu and others of its ilk come with gstreamer as its backend by default.

So basically it's just a front end to whatever you'd like to use. I stand corrected.

Patrick wrote:Kaffeine is just a different frontend to Xine. Yes, xine is mostly used as a dvd player (with DVD menu support) but it also has fairly strong audio capabilities.

I know that Kaffeine is basically a frontend for Xine, even though other engines can be used with it. I just tend to refer to Xine and Kaffeine as two completely seperate programs, like I do with Mplayer and KMplayer.

Ryochan7 wrote:I know that Kaffeine is basically a frontend for Xine, even though other engines can be used with it. I just tend to refer to Xine and Kaffeine as two completely seperate programs, like I do with Mplayer and KMplayer.

MPlayer's official frontend/GUI is actually called GMPlayer

Man. People are really on my case about technicalities today and this is from people who don't like the use of the term GNU/Linux.