Created attachment 1891 [details]
Sample of affected AAC encoded file

Lewis, I was not able to reproduce the problem you describe here. Are you using a PowerPC based Mac perhaps? I only have access to a Intel based Mac at the moment. In the mean time you may want to try changing some of the File Types options in Server Settings to see if it makes a difference. The "Apple AAC, Lossless or Movie File" would be the ones to change. I suggest leaving only AIFF checked and turing on d_source in Debugging and then try playing the track again. This will at least take LAME and FLAC out of the picture. You may also want to attach the new log to this bug.

Just tried with a PowerPC based Mac and was not able to reproduce. As a long shot have you tried Repair Disk Permissions from Disk Utility?

Yes, have repaired permissions, reinstalled SlimServer, trashed prefs and caches, deleted and rescanned music library. Static remains in AAC files. Also tried your other suggestion of disabling file types. The only *on* format was Apple AAC, Lossless or Movie File--AIFF--mov123. Still static only. I'll attached a text file of the log. See if that offers any clues as to what's going on. Thanks.

Created attachment 1892 [details]
Log with only AAC format *on*

Lewis, would you be willing to run the transcoding command in the terminal to try to isolate the problem? To do this, run terminal from the utilities folder on your mac. Then paste in the following command I created from your log into the terminal window on one line and hit return. Be sure to include the quotes:

"/Users/lewist/Library/PreferencePanes/SlimServer.prefPane/Contents/server/Bin/darwin/mov123" "/Documents/iTunes Music/Compilations/Gold/08 The Winner Takes It All.m4a" > "/Documents/iTunes Music/Compilations/Gold/08 The Winner Takes It All.pcm"

This should create a raw pcm file in the same folder as the original file. You can change the command to use a different file if you wish. Then we can open the file and check for static. You can do this by using the free program Audacity, starting a new project and using the Import Raw Data option under the Project menu and using the default options when opening the pcm file. You can get Audacity here: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ otherwise you can attach the raw pcm file to this bug if you wish.

Is the ">" character supposed to end the second line?

If it is then I get the following response in Terminal:

Last login: Sun Apr  1 00:17:25 on ttyp2
Welcome to Darwin!
Lewis-Mac:~ lewist$ "/Users/lewistsalis/Library/PreferencePanes/SlimServer.prefPane/Contents/server/Bin/darwin/mov123"
Bus error
Lewis-Mac:~ lewist$ "/Documents/iTunes Music/Compilations/Gold/08 The Winner Takes It All.m4a" >
-bash: syntax error near unexpected token `newline'
Lewis-Mac:~ lewist$ "/Documents/iTunes Music/Compilations/Gold/08 The Winner Takes It All.pcm"
-bash: /Documents/iTunes Music/Compilations/Gold/08 The Winner Takes It All.pcm: No such file or directory
Lewis-Mac:~ lewist$ 



If I remove the ">" character I get:

Last login: Sun Apr  1 00:17:13 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
Lewis-Mac:~ lewist$ "/Users/lewist/Library/PreferencePanes/SlimServer.prefPane/Contents/server/Bin/darwin/mov123"
Bus error
Lewis-Mac:~ lewist$ "/Documents/iTunes Music/Compilations/Gold/08 The Winner Takes It All.m4a"
-bash: /Documents/iTunes Music/Compilations/Gold/08 The Winner Takes It All.m4a: Permission denied
Lewis-Mac:~ lewist$ "/Documents/iTunes Music/Compilations/Gold/08 The Winner Takes It All.pcm"
-bash: /Documents/iTunes Music/Compilations/Gold/08 The Winner Takes It All.pcm: No such file or directory
Lewis-Mac:~ lewist$

Either way no pcm file is produced.

Sorry Lewis, the very long command needs to be all on one line but was broken up by bugzilla. So it should look like this in the terminal:

"path to mov123" "path to m4a" > "path to pcm"

Once entered on a single line in the terminal hit return and it should produce the pcm file. I really appreciate your patients while we try and diagnose the issue.

Thanks for your patience!! I read again comment #6 and you did say to put it all on one line. Sorry about that. Well, it did produce a PCM file this time. Running it through Audacity produces a static free clean file. What does that mean?

Just for a laugh I reinstalled OSX 10.4.8 and SlimServer on another volume and loaded my iTunes muisc library. Playing the AAC files through SB3 produces clean static free files. Maybe the solution is to do just that -- revert to 10.4.8.

Lewis, since you were able to successfully transcode the ACC file means that the static is being introduced somewhere else in the process. Reverting to Mac OS X 10.4.8 is not an ideal solution and not always easy to do. Have you tried updating your new working build of 10.4.8 to 10.4.9? Have you tried a nightly version of SlimServer?

(In reply to comment #10)
> Lewis, since you were able to successfully transcode the ACC file means that
> the static is being introduced somewhere else in the process. Reverting to Mac
> OS X 10.4.8 is not an ideal solution and not always easy to do. Have you tried
> updating your new working build of 10.4.8 to 10.4.9? Have you tried a nightly
> version of SlimServer?
> 
I downloaded a nightly build (SlimServer_6.5_v2007-04-10). My firmware also needed updating after installing the nighlty build -- up from v72 to v81. Reimported my library and the static in AAC was still there. If I have time this weekend I'll upgrade my fresh copy of 10.4.8 to 10.4.9 and see if that fixes things.

Issue is resolved. The problem was a bug with the iWow plug-in for iTunes. More specifically the iTea component. See response below:

----------------------------------
iTea is part of iWOW that enables it to work inside of iTunes. We (Rogue Amoeba) provide it to SRS, and they provide the rest of the plugin (the user interface, audio processing, etc).
Today we looked into this bug, and we believe we have found both the cause and a solution for it. Thankfully SlimDevices had provided us with SqueezeBoxes in the past, so it was easy for us to track down.
The short of it is, debugging versions of iWOW (or any iTea-powered product) would corrupt the output of "mov123", causing invalid audio to be sent on the SqueezeBox. 
We've sent off the permanent fix to SRS, so hopefully you can contact them sometime next week and they'll have a new build of iWOW for you to use. A temporary fix also exists, by setting the "iTeaDebugging" flag in the Info.plist file to false.
- Quentin D. Carnicelli, Software Engineer, Rogue Amoeba Software, LLC

----------------------------------

This is fantastic news!  I'm curious, how did you figure out it was the iWOW plug-in for iTunes?

Joe Barrett on the Slim Devices forums identified the iWow plug-in as the source of the problem. I just did a bit of snooping and found that an earlier version of iWow worked fine (v1.1.3). Version history showed that iTea was really the only significant change to the version that stopped working. I contacted SRS with the news. They said they were not aware of any issues and would have an engineer look into it. And then we have the reply from Rogue Amoeba with the fix.

Link to forums regarding this issue: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?p=211633#post211633

Closing resolved bugs - if you feel this bug still exists please first re-test
with the latest SW/FW version.  If you are able to reproduce then feel free to
reopen and attach new logs / steps to reproduce.