What's the trick to get ALAC audio files to work?

English Multimedia
1

For the last several years, I would link up to the PackMan repository and update the SUSE supplied plugins for gstreamer-plugin-bad and gstreamer-plugin-ugly with the PackMan copies, which would allow playback of Apple lossless files (ALAC). I just loaded up a new system recently, and even after adding the PackMan Repositories, I see there are no updates available any more for these gstreamer plugins. Needless to say, my audio player (Lollypop) is not able to detect ALAC files now with the SUSE supplied files. Is there a new procedure to get these working?

2

You need gstreamer-plugins-libav and ffmpeg, last build by Packman

https://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/documentation/libav/index.html?gi-language=c

3

The openSUSE repos have it…

zypper in alac
4

Installed “alac” with no change. (This never worked in the past for me,but tried anyways.)

Switched the following packages over to PackMan:

gstreamer-plugins-libav
ffmpeg-5

No change.

Ran a zypper vendor update to pull everything else in from PackMan, no change.

Tried Gnome Music just to see if it’s a Lollypop issue, not seeing any ALAC files in there either.

Any other suggestions? Or did I uncover a possible bug?

5

Hi
Your talking about M4a files? If so all good here with Lollypop, must be a missing codec…

6

Just tried playing a downloaded .m4a (container format with Apple lossless audio codec) from here…
https://filesamples.com/formats/m4a
…played successfully with both VLC and Clementine. (It’s an open source codec so should be available from the OSS repo?)

7

When installing the ‘alac’ package, did it drag in ‘libalac0’ as well? If I remove that package I’m no longer able to play .m4a files (as expected) with my preferred music player.

8

Files there are in AAC format in m4a container.

Try that files: https://archive.org/search.php?query=subject%3A"ALAC"&and]=subject%3A%22ALAC%22
https://archive.org/details/NineInchNailsTheSlip24bit48khz2008
https://archive.org/download/NineInchNailsTheSlip24bit48khz2008/01999999.m4a (intro, music at the end)
https://archive.org/download/NineInchNailsTheSlip24bit48khz2008/021000000.m4a

ALAC is open right now and simply works.

Audacious complains about “stream 0, timescale not set”, but plays them.

9

Yep, as I already mentioned, and just works for me. :wink:

10

alac is plyaing her in Leap with vlc and QMplay2 fine.

Have you installed all ffmpeg3 and ffmpeg4?

zypper se -si ffmpeg libav