Bug#703732: faad fails to gaplessly decode itunes, nero, fraunhofer aac

[Julian Hughes]

Package: faad
Version: 2.7-8
Severity: normal
Tags: upstream

faad incorrectly decodes any aac/m4a audio file that was encoded by 
neroaacenc or itunes or fraunhofer fdkaac/libfdk.  This breaks 
gapless playback.

example:

Take an CD such as The Beatles' Abbey Road which plays without gaps. 
Rip and encode to individual flacs or wavs. The files play without 
any gap, for example in mpd or with 'mplayer2 -gapless-audio'.
 
Encode the wavs to m4a with faac.  Use faad to decode the m4a files 
to wav i.e. `faad -o out.wav in.m4a` The wavs play without any gap.

Now encode the original wavs to m4a but use an encoder other than faac:

Use faad to decode the m4a files to wav.  Now the wavs play with a gap 
between each track. 
Using a different decoder such as neroAacDec on the same files produces 
wavs which play without gaps.

The same problem is in any application which decodes with unpatched 
libfaad2. I notice Rockbox has patched libfaad and their version
properly decodes aac/m4a regardless of which encoder was used.  The
same files which don't decode gaplessly on my PC with faad or libfaad 
do decode gaplessly on my portable running Rockbox.  I believe
Squeezebox also patch libfaad to do the same but I can't confirm it
works.


-- System Information:
Debian Release: 7.0
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 3.8.3 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages faad depends on:
ii  libc6     2.13-38
ii  libfaad2  2.7-8

faad recommends no packages.

faad suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information