Mint 18.1 - Unable to play Apple lossless files in this release

[ec91066]

Hello,

I have this problem with Mint 18.1 Cinnamon which never occurred in previous releases (I've been using Mint 17.3 lately).

I have my music collection in Apple lossless (m4a) and I can't play it on Rhythmbox, Clementine and Banshee. However, I can play it on VLC and Audacious.

a) Rhythmbox does not build a music library. Can't even select files.
b) Clementine builds a music library but gives an error message stating that a plugin is missing to GStreamer when I attempt to play something.
c) Banshee builds a music library and gives error message saying plugin necessary not found, mono-sgen needs plugin Apple Lossless Audio (ALAC) decoder.

Been searching for a solution in Mint and Ubuntu forums but what I found doesn't apply to my case. Apparently I have all codecs and plugins.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

[xenopeek]

I don't have any ALAC M4A files but found a free test file on http://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/testfiles.asp. I installed mint-meta-codecs. I can reproduce the issue as you describe both on Linux Mint 18.1 and on Ubuntu 16.04 (with ubuntu-restricted-extras installed). As you already said, all the information I could find about it online doesn't help

Starting xplayer from the terminal I find this error but it doesn't help to find a solution:

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** Message: Missing plugin: gstreamer|1.0|xplayer|Apple Lossless Audio (ALAC) decoder|decoder-audio/x-alac, samplesize=(int)16, max-input-size=(int)13809 (Apple Lossless Audio (ALAC) decoder)

Right now I think you have two options. Either use a music player that works with ALAC or convert the ALAC files to FLAC. From elsewhere suggested mpv, smplayer, gogglesmm and qmpp should work. These are all different kinds of crappy, at least for playing music. From my own testing most other players don't work as they use GStreamer. To convert the files to FLAC you can use ffmpeg (install it first) with command like: ffmpeg -i oldfile.m4a newfile.flac

Edit: also tried Totem and it recommends to install gstreamer1.0-libav and gstreamer1.0-libav:i386 but didn't change anything apart from Totem no longer recommending to install them I can play the test file without issue on Arch Linux and that also had gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad but installing that didn't change anything either. I'm left with the conclusion that GStreamer on Ubuntu 16.04 is broken.

[greerd]

DeaDBeef plays the test m4a test file from xenopeeks test site without issue.

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sudo add-apt-repository ppa:starws-box/deadbeef-player
sudo apt-get update

[ec91066]

Thanks xenopeek, I guess we will have to wait for an update on gstreamer.

Thanks for your tip greerd. Now I remeber seeing deadbeef once on an ArtrtistX distro (I think). Like Audacious, has a great equalizer but not very practical to manage nearly 500 albums .

[tkf]

I have the same problem now with Clementine on LM 18.1, was playing ALAC files fine until last week.

Update manager offered 6 gstreamer updates along with other updates, after I installed them, Clementine started showing missing plugin errors.

I assume that Clementine is looking for the old files that were overwritten by the updates.
I cannot find a config file or such for Clementine that may be referring to the old files.
Does anybody know if Clementine has such a file, or perhaps the references are hard coded in the program.

[xenopeek]

The problem is not with Clementine, the problem is with GStreamer (as all media players that use GStreamer have the same problem with ALAC files). On an unpatched Linux Mint 18.1 and Ubuntu 16.04 the issue is already present so I hesitate to say the problem is related to an update.

[Inhabitans]

As a professional musician I frequently make use of my audio player in Linux Mint. No problems, until some days ago: trying to play my alac files (and I've got many of these) now results in a message "missing plugin". As I understood from other messages on the forum, the problem lies in an "ill-fated" update of gstreamer. My questions: is the problem known to the "gstreamer-people" and could we receive a correct update on short notice? Thanx...

[ec91066]

Hi all.

Yesterday installed Ubuntu's gst-libav1.0 update. Banshee and Clementine are working fine now. Problems in Rhythmbox remain.

[Flemur]

Mint 18.1
FWIW, I was able to play an ALAC file from
http://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/testfiles.asp
with mpv, vlc, audacity (and of course foobar), but NOT smplayer.

[cuph62]

Hi, I managed to solve this by :

apt-get install gstreamer1.0-libav
rm ~/.gstreamer-0.10

Restarted Clementine and it worked ! Finally can play m4a files ...

[newmusic]

This reply might be a bit late but here goes:

I have had problems using Clementine and being unable to play m4a files but I never really bothered with it.
Today, however, it annoyed me so I looked for an answer. Seems everybody on the forums is sitting with the same problem.

I have mint 18.3 and I see there is a menu option to install missing codecs.
I tried that (it installs quite a lot of codecs - even for flash player), closed the program completely and restarted Clementine. Immediately, the files were not greyed out anymore and it played straight away.

Hope this helps somebody.