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

[Julian Hughes]

On Mon, 25 Mar 2013 21:37:17 +0100
Fabian Greffrath <fabian at greffrath.com> wrote:

> The problem with your tests is that you can only exchange frontend
> *and* library for comparison. Could you try again with different
> fontends for the exact same libfaad2 again, e.g. mplayer, mplayer2,
> vlc, totem, xine?

Hi Fabian

I didn't explicitly mention it because I wanted to keep the report and
description concise, but I did also try xine-ui and totem.  I didn't
try VLC because it doesn't support gapless even for those codecs which
are designed to be gapless i.e. vorbis, flac and wavpack.  I don't have
the original MPlayer installed but I did use it for years (until just a
couple of months ago) and know that it has never supported gapless; the
-gapless-audio option is specific to MPlayer2. 

I got the same results with Totem (gstreamer backend) and xine-ui, both
being the normal versions from wheezy repos.

I also tried clementine, exaile, quod libet, foobnix, gmusicbrowser
(gstreamer and mplayer backends), decoding to fifo for buffering and
playing the fifo with aplay, aqualung, moc, parole, and finally xmms2!
None of the players claiming to support gapless in multiple formats in
fact support nero or fraunhofer gapless m4a, and some of them don't
even get vorbis right. I even installed iTunes on my Eee PC's Windows XP
partition (never again) and made some gapless tracks and can confirm
that standard iTunes gapless files are also not decoded gaplessly by
any of the mentioned apps. The upside is that after running iTunes on XP
a few unwanted clicks and gaps seem quite benign.  

I haven't tried any of the K apps as all my computers are either
headless or running Xfce but I've had a nice tour of Debian's
multimedia sections and unforunately it seems there isn't any 
player which can play gapless m4a unless the file was produced by faac.

I have to say that if I'd initially understood the Rockbox solution to
be entirely on their front end and not at all on libfaad then I probably
would never have opened a bug report against faad.  I guess this is
going to be one of those wishlist bugs..... :-)

cheers

Julian