Do you see any error message in server.log?

Nope, when I tail -f the server.log, nothing happens if I play an m4a file.  It just makes a static sound and then goes quiet and on the squeeze center web interface it looks like things are playing (progress bar is moving, etc).

Dave: is your music in 96 kHz Apple Lossless by chance?

Quicktime says: AAC, Stereo (L R), 22.050 kHz
63.99 kbits/s

I can play m4a files (AAC lossy files encoded with itunes) from readynas duo to squeezebox boom, running 7.3.1 SC.  However, at the beginning of every m4a song, there is a "click" or pop sound. otherwise songs play OK.  When I run the SC 7.3.1 from an XP computer to the boom, I do NOT get the click or pop on m4a files.

Dave, what options do you show under Settings > Advanced > File Types?  On the sparc based ReadyNAS units we are relying on the Netgear provided decoder for AAC playback.  You should see under AAC or Movie File WAV mp42aac/aac2wav.

You could also try enabling player.source logging to Debug under Settings > Advanced > Logging and try playing your AAC file again and then attache the resulting log to this bug.  It might help to attache the AAC file you used to this bug as well.

Verified it's using mp42aac/aac2wav (and I checked on the readynas that those binaries exist.

I'm attaching the log file.

In the meantime can I just cat my m4a file like so?

aac2wav my_file.m4a | my_file.wav?  Perhaps the problem is with aac2wav?

Created attachment 4650 [details]
server log file with player.source set to debug while playing a few m4a tracks.

So I took an m4a file and ran it through mp42aac and the file was silent, when I took the resulting aac file and ran it through aac2wav I got the resulting static that I get when I try to play the file via the squeezebox.

So the problem is with these conversion programs.  I think.

I can confirm the brief 'pop' or 'click' sound at the beginning of the track when playing any aac track (mostly encoded with itunes) from my ReadyNAS (running 4.1.5-T37 firmware) and SC 7.3.3 - 24919.  

Is this something that Netgear will have to resolve?  Is there a workaround (different encoder)?

We are now planning to make a 7.3.3 release.  Please review your bugs (all marked open against 7.3.3) to see if they can be fixed in the next few weeks, or if they should be retargeted for 7.4 or future.

Thanks!

Since there's now a planned 7.3.3 release, bugs which won't make the cut-off are being moved to the next target out.  If you feel that this bug needs to be addressed more (or less) urgently than the 7.4 release, please cc chris@slimdevices.com and leave a comment in the bug to that effect so we can review it.

Thanks.

For some reason Bugzilla did not change the target when I did this yesterday.  Or maybe it was me.  In either case, I'm trying it again.

Ideally SqueezeCenter would just use faad for transcoding aac but unfortunately the sparc based readynas is simply not powerful enough to do it real time.

Not sure what could be done for mp42aac/aac2wav.  The one problem may be that SqueezeCetner is expecting the output to be 16/44.1kHz wav when in fact it is 16/22.050kHz wav.

As far as the brief 'pop' or 'click' perhaps we are decoding the wav header coming out of aac2wav.

Alan, an ideas on this one?

*** Bug 11891 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

I was (through support) at the origin of the reopening of #11891. I can understand that those bugs are related but my problem is about Internet radio streaming AAC which is disabled (with 7.3.3 original configuration) or that play at double-speed if I follow instructions given in this bug thread (with the convert file modification). If I have a solution where I hear a click sound, it would be already  a big progress! Can I get at first the best configuration of the convert file so far? Maybe I will hear this click only once with the internet radio?

I am using 7.3.3 and custom-convert modified as instructed in bug thread #11891 in order to play AAC:

aac wav * *
    # IF
    [aac2wav] -wav -stdin -stdout

Then I made a simple test: converted one of my flac files into AAC and I could play it with SqueezeCenter. Converted it again but using a sampling rate of 22kHz and this time it played double speed with SqueezeCenter. So here I got same result than when listening to one of the problematic radios (for instance RMF FM: http://87.98.222.167:8002).
My problem is with AAC radios (sampling 22Khz as I understand) not with AAC files which  don't use.

I'm not sure if this will be possible to achieve with the ReadyNAS, given the tools available. SC assumes that all transcoding that results in WAV is at 44100 samples/s. Currently, this is a hard limitation. For streamed radio there are even more issues.

I'm not very pleased with that statement. ReadyNAS is a platform supported. Would it be possible that you or Netgear modify the aac2wav so that it outputs 44 kHz whatever the input rate. I can't see any hardware constrainst. This is pure software so it can be fixed. Again I have tested that aac2wav program works well on ReadyNAS with AAC that are already sampled at 44kHz.

(In reply to comment #19)
> I'm not very pleased with that statement. ReadyNAS is a platform supported.
> Would it be possible that you or Netgear modify the aac2wav so that it outputs
> 44 kHz whatever the input rate. I can't see any hardware constrainst. This is
> pure software so it can be fixed. Again I have tested that aac2wav program
> works well on ReadyNAS with AAC that are already sampled at 44kHz.

I agree...I feel that this is something that at the very least should be brought to the attention of the Netgear developers, as it seems the problem is w/ the aac2wav executable on their SPARC platform.

The problem is that the ReadyNAS platform does not have sufficient CPU power to run some of the more complex SC features, including non-trivial transcoding.