[rockman]

Hello - Please advise of the formats support out of box. It seems with my collection, this is only an MP3 file player. Nightingale refuses to play any m4a files which are either AAC from iTunes or ALAC ripped files. Thanks

[freaktechnik]

What OS are you on?

edit:
Your AAC files from iTunes must be DRM protected, so we can't play them. ALAC is a proprietary format from Apple only they can play. Consider FLAC as an alternative format that will work in pretty much any player but iTunes/QuickTime.

[rockman]

(02-23-2014, 10:27 AM)freaktechnik Wrote: What OS are you on?

edit:
Your AAC files from iTunes must be DRM protected, so we can't play them. ALAC is a proprietary format from Apple only they can play. Consider FLAC as an alternative format that will work in pretty much any player but iTunes/QuickTime.

Hi freaktachnik - thx for your response. I am on Win7 x64. None of my AAC files have DRM. ALAC has been open source and royalty-free for a few years now. I've used MusicBee http://getmusicbee.com/ and they've got support for AAC via neroaacenc.exe and ALAC via ffmpeg.exe. libavcodec is also available. Foobar 2000 has it, too.

Other music players have so many features, options, menus and eye candy that they make them difficult to use by mere mortals. I really like the Nightingale UI. It's clean, functional yet is simple use and understand. I'd like the chance to really use Nightingale. To take it for a spin. However, it's a non-starter for me at the moment. And for someone recently freed of the iTunes shackles and looking for an alternative music player, I had higher expectations of Nightingale.

I still haven't found any information about supported formats on the Nightingale webpage. I'd expect to find that on the front page. Did I miss it?

Cheers

[rsjtdrjgfuzkfg]

(02-23-2014, 07:40 PM)rockman Wrote: I still haven't found any information about supported formats on the Nightingale webpage. I'd expect to find that on the front page. Did I miss it?

The supported formats depend on your OS. For ALAC, it seems to me like you'd need gstreamer-ffmpeg. If you were on linux, you could try that. On windows, however, I doubt that there are suitable binaries available and building for Nightingale is quite much work. I have plans to have a look at general building if I should find the time to build all the other dependencies, but currently I've got too much of a real life going on.

In theory, AAC should work if you have QuickTime installed. But I'm not sure there.

(02-23-2014, 07:40 PM)rockman Wrote: And for someone recently freed of the iTunes shackles and looking for an alternative music player, I had higher expectations of Nightingale.

To be honest, I don't think you're freed yet. While I don't know why you actually use AAC and ALAC, these are Apple formats. Apple designs hardware and formats to lock you into their products. While that is a good thing for them, it is a real pain in terms of interoparability. Don't get me wrong, the same goes for Microsoft (wma) and many other companies. But they did not succeed in etablishing these "standards" as "good" as Apple.

Thus, Apple products do not support the real standards that are out there; namely flac. It fullfills the same purpose than ALAC codec-wise, but without the lock in effect. If you don't want to use Apples stuff which was designed to reject other lossless formats than ALAC (I mainly think of iPods here), flac will serve you equally well - and converting between the formats will not influence the audio quality. Nightingale fully supports flac as well.

For AAC, however, I kinda agree that converting is not an option due to quality loss. But I hope the QuickTime option works for you there.

[rockman]

Hi rsjtdrjgfuzkfg - Thank you for the details. I understand now and wish the community the best of luck finding the time and resources to further improve and evolve Nightingale. I'll keep an eye on it and perhaps try it again in the future. If the community takes the iTunes convert user scenario as an opportunity to include native AAC and ALAC support - in at least an extensible way to circumvent any licensing issues - that would be a big win for this project. Perhaps allow the end user to configure external streamers, such like MusicBee? I can imagine in the future such "marketing" to convert iTunes folks to Nightingale.

In closing, product information is not conspicuous at the moment. It would be helpful to publish capabilities, features and format support of nightingale on the homepage.

Cheers

[freaktechnik]

Songbird (the program we forked to create Nightingale) had native QuickTime and WMP support, mainly to decode DRM protected files. Sadly those parts are closed source and we thus can't distribute or improve them.

Our website currently is pretty bare-bones A new layout and additional contents are in the work. It will contain a feature showcase which will also give exact information about codec support, as far as we can give it. We already have a page addressing this issue for videos on our wiki, in case someone tries to play an unsupported video format.

[rockman]

(02-24-2014, 02:52 AM)freaktechnik Wrote: Songbird (the program we forked to create Nightingale) had native QuickTime and WMP support, mainly to decode DRM protected files. Sadly those parts are closed source and we thus can't distribute or improve them.

Our website currently is pretty bare-bones A new layout and additional contents are in the work. It will contain a feature showcase which will also give exact information about codec support, as far as we can give it. We already have a page addressing this issue for videos on our wiki, in case someone tries to play an unsupported video format.

Re: Licensing - Yes, and hence my comment about supporting end user configurable external streamers.

Re: website - Excellent, thank you. I'll keep an eye out. This is a great project and has huge potential, as Songbird did.

[freaktechnik]

Re: Licensing - Yes, and hence my comment about supporting end user configurable external streamers.
[/quote]
This already exists. You can put your own gstreamer plugins into the gst-plugins folder of your Nightingale installation. Additionally an extension can implement a custom mediacore to play formats our main mediacore doesn't support.

It still puzzles me is as to why you can't play sac/m4a files. I can play DRM free AAC files just fine with Nightingale on Windows ( I migrated from iTunes a few years ago...).