How to enable m4a transcoding directly from the ampache.cfg file?

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Jay Hopkins

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Jun 15, 2016, 8:41:59 PM6/15/16
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So m4a transcoding is still not working for me, I found instructions on the Arch wiki here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ampache
which states that the information may be outdated since 3.8 release which I have.

They have a section for editing the conf file for m4a transcoding as well as dependencies which I have installed.
The syntax however appears to be different.

It shows:

; List of filetypes to transcode
transcode_m4a           = true
transcode_m4a_target    = mp3 

; These are the commands that will be run to transcode the file
transcode_cmd_m4a       = "faad -f 2 -w %FILE% | lame -r -b %SAMPLE% -S - -"

but in my conf file I have:

transcode_m4a = "required"

Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks in advance.

Andy Pastuszak

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Jun 15, 2016, 9:17:32 PM6/15/16
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The Ampache wiki on Githib has a nice section on transcoding:

https://github.com/ampache/ampache/wiki/Transcoding

Andy Pastuszak

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Jun 15, 2016, 9:18:36 PM6/15/16
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And a question.  Why are yo trying to transcode m4a.  Most devices and browsers will play the file natively.

Andy



On Wednesday, June 15, 2016 at 8:41:59 PM UTC-4, Jay Hopkins wrote:

Jay Hopkins

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Jun 15, 2016, 10:43:59 PM6/15/16
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Well I fixed my problem by setting the value to "allow".
But in an answer to your question, on my Linux laptop or via the webplayer, any files in the m4a format were of terrible low fidelity/grainy quality.
I use the Tomahawk player on Linux and Android.
On Android the m4a problem was non-existent (unless accessed via the webplayer).
But setting that value to true seems to have fixed the issue.

Andy Pastuszak

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Jun 15, 2016, 11:06:35 PM6/15/16
to Jay Hopkins, Ampache
you may be missing the needed codec for AAC.  If Tomahawk uses Gstreamer, make sure that you install the good, bad, ugly, and ffmpeg codecs.  Another nice Ampache player for Linux is Viridian (http://viridian.daveeddy.com/).  It requires python 2.  It will fail to load if python 3 is your default python.  You just need to go into the main .py file and edit #/usr/bin/python to #1/usr/bin/python2 and it fires right up.

Andy

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Jay Hopkins

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Jun 17, 2016, 6:41:00 PM6/17/16
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I tried Viridian and as I recall it would connect to my Server but wouldn't play.
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