M4A playback seems broken - 4.0.beta1

[Peachcake]

I was having the same problem with m4a not playing and the logs were just showing the % of decoding done and would even say successfully sent to last.fm for scrobbling as far as logging goes so no helpful information there. All i did was restarted my box running the subsonic service, then on the box that I am streaming to I went to Tools > Clear Recent History... Form & Search History, Cookies, Cache, Active logins from my browser (FF 3.6.3 on Windows XP Prof SP3). I am now able to listen to m4a (I also turned the aac and m4a transcoding off like suggested previously before I did all of this.) Long story short, its working! Good luck and I hope all who have this problem can get it fixed. I assume its a browser cache issue? My 2 cents anyway.

Peachcake

[sindre_mehus]

Great, thanks for helping out!

[dobson]

yeah, it does seem to be something specific to my server setup. not sure why, every other update has worked pretty well by simply replacing the 4 files in /var/subsonic/standalone. . .

in any case, using the installer package on my macbook pro (not my osx10.4 server) I was able to quickly get it up and running and playing m4a files in no time...

however, still no luck on the server. after a "fresh" install, deleting everything in the /var/subsonic/ folder and just letting subsonic rebuild everything, it still didn't help. (in fact, it wouldn't even start at first... but I've documented that bit here. my old transcoding script is broken. disabling it doesn't work. . . and ffmpeg transcoding isn't working either. (and I forgot to mention in my last post, I have tried clearing caches and stuff like that).

clearly this isn't a general problem as some people are getting it to work. Sindre, what are your suspicions? could this be a problem with my ffmpeg? or should the new 4.0b1 not even have to resort to ffmpeg? (i don't really understand what's going on under the hood in the new version).

one last odd observation for what it's worth in debugging: when I try to play an m4a with transcoding off, as I mentioned before, the play button in the flash player turns to a "pause" icon, but no sound comes out. however, if I click pause, i can then see the gray "loading progress" going across the flash player, as if something is indeed going on. nonetheless, when I hit play again, still nothing happens. no time increments, no sounds, no play indicator...

[Peachcake]

I just tried playing the same m4a tracks again and I seem to have ran into the same problem where they weren't playing at all. I did another browser cache reset like i mentioned earlier and it I was able to play the tracks. Maybe the browser cache is only part of the problem? I wish I knew . If it happens again I will grab the logs immediately and put them up although last time i checked the logs last time and nothing seemed wrong in the DEBUG.

[sindre_mehus]

Yes, it could potentially be a browser cache problem.

It would be extremely helpful if you (or anyone else having similar problems) could create a test account for me on your Subsonic server, so I could try to understand more of the problem.

Thanks in advance

Sindre

[dobson]

hi sindre,
I have another piece of the puzzle!... silly I didn't notice it before really.
the files that I'm having trouble playing are labeled as m4a within subsonic (of course), but they are actually apple lossless files instead of AAC files! can't believe i didn't catch it sooner.

I was just making you a user account and PMing you with the files you should try, I decided to look at a bunch more files and eventually came across one that worked... turns out it was AAC codec instead of apple lossless. SO, that's an obvious issue... now that I think about it, someone mentioned earlier in this thread that they had difficulty playing m4a files "over 10 MB" or something... perhaps this is their problem as well?

I now have two questions:

1) should 4.0b1 be able to play apple lossless m4a without transcoding? or should I still stick with a transcoding script to play apple lossless files? (the script I had been using successfully is discussed here)

2) why is the script not currently working in 4.0b1 as it was in 3.9? Have you changed something within the program regarding where it looks for transcoding files? here is the error I get in subsonic.log (but the m4a2mp3.sh file is indeed in /var/subsonic/transcode/)

Code: Select all

[2010-05-02 08:01:08,856] DEBUG TranscodeInputStream - Starting transcoder: [/var/subsonic/transcode/m4a2mp3] [/Volumes/TheVault/Music/The Doors/Box Set (Disc 1_ Without a Safety Net)/02 Queen of the Highway.m4a] [128]
[2010-05-02 08:01:08,857] WARN TranscodingService - Failed to transcode /Volumes/TheVault/Music/The Doors/Box Set (Disc 1_ Without a Safety Net)/02 Queen of the Highway.m4a. Using original.
java.io.IOException: /var/subsonic/transcode/m4a2mp3: not found
   at java.lang.UNIXProcess.forkAndExec(Native Method)
   at java.lang.UNIXProcess.<init>(UNIXProcess.java:52)
   at java.lang.ProcessImpl.start(ProcessImpl.java:91)
   at java.lang.ProcessBuilder.start(ProcessBuilder.java:451)
   at java.lang.Runtime.exec(Runtime.java:591)
   at java.lang.Runtime.exec(Runtime.java:464)

and the list goes on (I can provide more if needed).

I'm also wondering if this problem could be related to the problem I had with the new subsonic.sh startup script being unable to find the jarfile... I documented that problem here.

as always, let me know if I can provide any more info. thanks!

[sindre_mehus]

Ah, very good, that's a plausible theory!

I doubt very much that the Flash player (as well as SubAir and the Android client) supports Apple Lossless, which is a proprietary format AFAIK.

So to play Apple Lossless you would still have to convert it. If you somehow were able to rename these files to something else than .m4a you could have it both ways.

Regarding the m4a2mp3 script: First of all I don't think it's necessary to have a separate script. You could just use the default "m4a>mp3" transcoding as documented here.

But if you want to use the script, you probably need to add the ".sh" in Step 1. At least that's what I suggested in the thread you linked to

Ok, thanks for letting us know about the Apple Lossless stuff, at least it means that transcoding in 4.0 is not completely messed up!

Sindre

[yamfox]

Apple lossless has never worked for me, on any version.

[joshpar]

glad to find this discussion... Apple Lossless works fine for me on 3.9, but the beta 2 for 4.0 does not work. I simply reverted to 3.9 for the time being...
Sindre - if it would help I can send you a login to my server, or can even post a lossless file for you to download if you want.

[Grimmy]

Subsonic 4.1 -> M4A fails
Subsonic 4.0.1 -> M4A works

Examples of albums that fail (bought from iTunes Music Store)
Christel Alsos » Tomorrow Is
The Beach Boys » The Very Best Of The Beach Boys

[Miles Redford]

I don't get it at all
the m4a has always worked for me as far as I know till this morning.
tried to restore certain files from original encoded folder on a different pc, still no go
then I see this in here, suggestion to disable its transcoding, and now it works


odd.

I will say, 3 days ago I did install the newest v6.1.6 - totally disliked it and so I reverted back to 4.7 beta 3
since doing that, I have had this issue as well as some playlist issues which have all been fixed now by manual restoration and this...wtf?!

as for the newest version, I tried it because I was hoping for some playlist fixes and some podcast fixes and hoped maybe also some useful user setup fixes and player fixes...saw none and did not like the new interface, so I went back to what I liked and what seems to work fine or at least as good as it was. again wtf!?

[crashoverride025]

I'm seeing this behavior for podcasts with version 6.1.6.

Podcast: https://anchor.fm/happypathprogramming