Ovidiu Predescu's Weblog

Playing AAC files on slimserver: faad2 problems

The Seagate Barracuda 200Gb hard-disk of my music system decided to die about a week ago. I'm going to send it out to the manufacturer for an exchange, but in the meantime I went out got a Maxtor 250Gb hard-disk instead.

As if this was not painful enough, reinstalling the slimserver software was not as easy as I had expected. After getting Linux and the slimserver software installed, playing AAC files would produce nothing but a disturbing hiss in the speakers. Searching on google for a fix revealed that there might be a problem with different endianess of the bytes being outputted by faad2, the AAC decoding software.

The proposed solution was not pretty: pipe faad2's wav output to lame, which would correctly re-encode the file as mp3. The problem with this solution is that the machine I'm using to serve the music is not beefy, it has only a meager 600MHz Via processor. So I wrote instead a very simple program to swap the order of bytes from stdin and print them out in the correct order at stdout.

Get the program from here, and compile it like this on your machine:

cc -o swab swab.c

Copy the resulting swab binary in /usr/local/bin, or some other location in your path. If you're on linux where mov123 does not exist, carefully comment out all the lines that refer to it in your slimserver's convert.conf file. Then add the following at the end of the file:

mov wav squeezebox *
    [faad] -w -f 2 $FILE$ | swab

The above did the trick for me, and I'm again a happy squeezebox user!