How to play .aac / .m4a files in cmus in 14.04 (trusty)?

Question

I am unable to playback .m4a (aac) files in cmus. They work in mplayer and totem. Anyone know a fix? $ cat /etc/issue Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS \n \l

I already tried blowing away ~/.gstreamer*, updating cmus and cmus-plugin-ffmpeg...

Solution 1

Currently the ffmpeg plugin is broken. To enable aac in .m4a or .mp4 libmp4v2 has to be enabled in the cmus build.

To that end you can build yourself adding libmp4v2-dev to the build deps.

Otherwise have latest 2.6 here in an almost stand-alone ppa, has another semi orphan in Aqualung. Libav support has been removed

https://launchpad.net/~mc3man/+archive/ubuntu/aqua-tests

As far as lavc support. The main issue is Libav has dropped swresample for avresample & cmus will not work well or at all with avresample. However FFmpeg still builds both. So to that end a fully enabled cmus 2.6 with ffmpeg.so included is available here.

Please note that this ppa includes both Libav11 & FFmpeg 2.4.x & Will Not be Suitable for all. Read the page carefully before adding..

https://launchpad.net/~mc3man/+archive/ubuntu/testing6

Solution 2

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cmus/+bug/1311337

I found it reported in ubuntuforums.org. Apparently ffmpeg broke backwards compatibility, it is fixed in newer cmus, but you have to build from source for now.

Update: I tried building from source, no luck. Probably related to this:

https://github.com/cmus/cmus/issues/139

Comments

[Andrew Wagner]

Thanks for posting, but I gave up trying to get cmus working. Whenever software I'm using is buggy or performs badly, I switch to something simpler. I have resorted to just calling mplayer directly on the files themselves. I pray that mplayer doesn't break; at that point I suppose I will have to call codec-specific programs.