Hello Simone,
Thank you very much for your helpful Wiki page, 'Logitech Media Server and FreeBSD/FreeNAS' (https://audiodigitale.eu/?p=87). It enabled my husband and me to get LMS up and happy on our spanking new TrueNAS server under FreeBSD 12. Everything worked so well, I was surprised when one of my Albums simply would not play. After about half a day of reading code, searching forums, and head scratching, we discovered the root cause: The Album was encoded in Apple ALAC format. There is a transcoding rule to deal with this, which sends the m4a file through faad and then through sox to create a stream that will play. However, the instructions you provide assume installing the latest and greatest faad will do the right thing. Alas, in 2016, a critical change was made to version 2.7 of faad2 that added ALAC support. A subsequent rewrite to the upstream version of faad never took that change, and made re-integrating that change not at all obvious. To those like mherger who know LMS backwards and forwards inside and outside, it's obvous, "We have our own version of faad, and it does the right thing." Learning that from swimming around in Forums and google searches is a challenge. Indeed, one could do a different transcoding setup using ffmpeg. The downside to doing so in that way is that ffmpeg wants to bring in elephantine quantities of other libraries. So using faad and adding in support specific to ALAC makes sense. I'm coming at this from the outside, and have only a partial understanding of the milieu. However, it seems to me that we should engage certain other maintainers with the following issues: 1. Update the instructions at 'Logitech Media Server and FreeBSD/FreeNAS' (https://audiodigitale.eu/?p=87) to utilize Ralph Irving's ALAC-aware fork of faad2. 2. Reach out to the maintainers of the FreeBSD port, https://www.freshports.org/audio/logitechmediaserver/ and let them know they need to either incorporate or point to the ALAC-aware fork of faad2. 3. Review the ALAC update to faad2 and see if getting it into upstream v2.10 is feasible, sensible so we could, longer term, eliminate the LMS-specific version. This probably involves outreach to Ralph Irving and his fork at https://github.com/ralph-irving/faad2 4. Maybe begin discussing how to get an easier summary of current state of ports than "swim around half a day in google and forums.slimdevices". With the shift to community support, marking all the legacy wiki pages read only makes sense, as does the approach of keeping the forums as the basis of ground truth. Unfortunately, the amount of data to digest is huge. As the first action step, Simone, would you agree that changing the instructions to point at ralph-irvings's ALAC-aware fork of faad2 in your page makes sense? Oh and one more thing... (Thinking of Steve Jobs saying so, and how such a preface leads into big stuff...) The current stable version of LMS has moved from 8.1.2 to 8.2, so some sort of refresh is apropos. The FreeBSD port mentions 7.9.2 as its basis. LMS 7.9 - 2xSB2, 2xBoom, 2xKodi, Ocean Digital WR2300S, Denon AVR-X6200W, SHIELD Android TV ------------------------------------------------------------------------ wcattey's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=7506 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=113909 _______________________________________________ Squeezecenter mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/squeezecenter
