flac files@Mac OS X

@agathis wrote:

I was tryed mt-daapd 0.2.4.1 from macropts and nightly Firefly-svn-1696. No one of them cant stream .flac files. Port flac from macports is installed.
What i’m doing wrong?

0.2.4.1 doesn’t do flac. You’ll need to use nightlies (http://nightlies.fireflymediaserver.org).

Generally, you’ll need the development packages for libflac and libogg, and the flac package installed. Then configure the nightly with –enable-sqlite3 –prefix=/opt/local

Should go okay from there. Not sure what your unix-foo is, so if that’s too terse, let me know, and I can walk you through it if you like.

@Labchip wrote:

I’m a complete n00b here. So sorry for the potentially idiotic question. I tried the search, but this was the closest I could find to an answer.

I’ve previously successfully been able to get Firefly Server to transcode FLACs to WAVs on a WinXP Pro PC. I’ve been able to access the Transcoded FLACs on all Mac and Win iTunes clients and even on FrontRow.

However, I’ve never managed to get it to do the transcoding part on a Mac. I’m running OS 10.4.11 on a PPC G4 Mac Mini. I have the latest FLAC binaries on my system (I also have Slimserver running which serves my FLACs to my SqueezeBox, and transcodes the FLACs to mp3s for remote streaming)

Could you please walk me through the steps of getting it to transcode FLACs? Could you please recommend a nightly that I could use? Does it need to be built with flac support, or simply run with some switches enabled? If it needs to be built, could you provide basic instructions?

I’d like to do this so I can access my squeezebox flac collection on AppleTV. I would also like to add my movie collection (these are currently .ISOs, but I am beginning to realize that H.264 or DivX or XviD might be the way to go). Do I need to do anything different for video support?

Thanks

Mkay, but it’s kinda ugly. The reason for it is that the flac stuff has lots of dependancies, so it’s hard to bundle up for mac. And doubly hard to bundle it all up in universal form.

In any case, first go here and install according to instructions:

http://www.macports.org/install.php

Make sure you’ve already installed the xcode tools from your leopard dvd.

Once you have that, from the terminal, do:

sudo port install libid3tag sqlite3 flac

That should get you all the stuff you need to build a flac-enabled binary.

Once you have that, grab the 1586 tarball from http://nightlies.fireflymediaserver.org

ron@laptop:~$ mkdir firefly

ron@laptop:~$ cd firefly

ron@laptop:~/firefly$ wget http://nightlies.fireflymediaserver.org/nightlies/svn-1586/mt-daapd-svn-1586.tar.gz

ron@laptop:~/firefly$ tar -xvzf mt-daapd-svn-1586.tar.gz

ron@laptop:~/firefly$ cd mt-daapd-svn-1586

ron@laptop:~/firefly/mt-daapd-svn-1586$ ./configure --enable-flac --enable-sqlite3 --with-id3tag=/opt/local



ron@laptop:~/firefly/mt-daapd-svn-1586$ make

At this point, you should have a binary with flac support. You can copy that to ~/Library/PreferencePanes/Firefly.prefPane/Contents/Resources/F
irefly Helper.app/Contents/Resources/Server/firefly, and the plugins in src/plugins/.lib/*so o ~/Library/PreferencePanes/Firefly.prefPane/Contents/Resources/F
irefly Helper.app/Contents/Resources/Server/plugins and it should start up from the preference pane. You should then be able to add .flac to your extensions list and have at it.

It looks fairly daunting probably if you have no unix experience, but hey, unix is teh fun! 🙂

— Ron

@Labchip wrote:

Thanks for the info and your patience. I tried to follow your steps, but I seem to have run into some trouble. I will try to outline what I did; perhaps you can tell me what I did wrong.

My monitor conked out last week, so I didn’t get much time on my mini. But I did try make a first attempt using SSH & VNC.

So I updated DarwinPorts to the newest version, and was able to get the packages libid3tag sqlite3 and flac (I think this brings version 1.1.2 while the current recommended version is 1.2.1 – but I guess I can worry about that later). I followed your instructions. Configure and make seemed to proceed without throwing out any drastic error messages.

Then from the ~/firefly/mt-daapd-svn-1586/src/plugins/.libs folder, I copied 3 files: ssc-script.so , rsp.so , and out-daap.so to the /Library/PreferencePanes/Firefly.prefPane/Contents/Resources/Firefly Helper.app/Contents/Resources/Server/plugins folder

That’s when I wasn’t too sure how to proceed. The only file that seemed to be the firefly binary with flac support, was a 528980 size executable file called ‘mt-daapd’ located in ~/firefly/mt-daapd-svn-1586/src/ . Is this correct? or am I hopelessly off target? So I copied this file as firefly to the folder /Library/PreferencePanes/Firefly.prefPane/Contents/Resources/Firefly Helper.app/Contents/Resources/Server/firefly . I noticed that the size was slightly less than half of the previous firefly file – but I thought perhaps it was because the original was a universal binary and this was not.

So then I tried to start the server from the preference pane, but it would not launch. Here is what the log says:

2008-02-20 12:26:34 (a000ed88): Firefly Version svn-1586: Starting with debuglevel 2
2008-02-20 12:26:34 (a000ed88): Plugin loaded: ssc-script/svn-1586
2008-02-20 12:26:34 (a000ed88): Plugin loaded: rsp/svn-1586
2008-02-20 12:26:34 (a000ed88): Plugin loaded: daap/svn-1586
2008-02-20 12:26:34 (a000ed88): Starting rendezvous daemon
2008-02-20 12:26:34 (a000ed88): Starting signal handler
2008-02-20 12:26:34 (a000ed88): Error opening db: No backend database support for type: sqlite

Any suggestions?

Thanks!

Ah, yes. You’ll need to change the db_type in your config file (~/Library/Application Support/Firefly/firefly.conf) to sqlite3, rather than sqlite.

That should do it.

— Ron

Would it be possible to upload the binaries you compiled?

OK, I havnt checked for a while, but better late than never. Sadly, the board doesn’t allow PM so I’m expressing my interest with a message here. You can upload the stuff to filedropper for example and post the link here.

Thanks in advance!