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Play AAC-encoded music in Rhythmbox | Ming Di Leom's Blog
Don't bother gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad, use gstreamer1.0-libav instead
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First Seen: 04/26/2024
Last Indexed: 10/23/2024
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Don't bother gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad, use gstreamer1.0-libav instead Recently I just switched from Foobar2000 (which requires Wine to run in Linux) to Rhythmbox. The first issue I encountered was it didn’t add AAC-encoded songs when I set it to scan library. A quick search for solution resulted in installation of gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad . While it did resolve the issue, but it also installed many packages: libgupnp-igd-1.0-4 libopenal1 libnice10 libsrtp2-1 libvo-aacenc0 libofa0 libusrsctp1 libsrt1 libwildmidi2 libopenal-data libfluidsynth1 libmplex2-2.1-0 libmpeg2encpp-2.1-0 libsoundtouch1 libmjpegutils-2.1-0 libvo-amrwbenc0 libspandsp2 libmodplug1 libgstreamer-plugins-bad1.0-0 Guest what, most are not even related to decoding AAC. In searching for leaner solution, I purged them and tried install libvo-aacenc0 only. But now Rhythmbox couldn’t play AAC, at the same time it suggested installing gstreamer1.0-libav or gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad . So, I proceed to install gstreamer1.0-libav and AAC can be played once again. Rhythmbox still can play it even after I purged libvo-aacenc0 , so it’s not needed after all. To make sure not only Rhythmbox can play AAC, but also recognise it during library scan, I also reset the library by removing “~/.local/share/rhythmbox/rhythmdb.xml”. No issue on that. One thing still puzzling me is that gstreamer1.0-libav is not actually an AAC decoder itself, (my understanding is that) it acts as a bridge between gstreamer and libav/ffmpeg to enable apps that utilize the former to encode/decode using the later, without additional code changes. The actual decoder I believe is in one of the following packages: libavcodec58 libavformat58 libfaad2 In my case, the above packages are already installed beforehand, perhaps shipped by default in Ubuntu (maybe not the libfaad2). So if Rhythmbox still can’t play AAC after installing gstreamer1.0-libav , just make sure those packages are there.