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VLC & MP3

karel

November 16, 2014 14:09

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I am using Rapbian and a HifiBerry DAC+ on a Raspberry B+.

Have managed to set the system up to work on my Hifi Audio equipment with VLC Media Player handling FLAC audio files, but this will not work with MP3 files.

When I play MP3 files through a line command (MPEG321) everything sounds fine (so MP3 as such seems to be working OK). When I check the Codec tab on the VLC Media Player I can see the data flowing hough (I also see the time bar progressing), but there is no audio output to the DAC+ (green LED remains off).

What should I do to make this work?

Thanks.

Karel

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6 comments

• 0
  
  HiFiBerry team November 16, 2014 14:47

  Hi Karel,
  
  I would guess, that VLC needs a seperate codec installed for this. However I'm not an VLC specialist. Maybe one of the other HiFiBerry users has an idea?
  
  Best regards
  Daniel
• 0
  
  karel November 16, 2014 20:29

  Thanks Daniel, I get the impression that the problem is not in the reading or the converting of the MP3 files by VLC. There is simply no audio output to the DAC+, whereas when playing FLAC files on VLC, the audio output through the DAC+ is excellent -of remarkably good quality. I believe the output module settings in VLC should be rather OK, otherwise I would not hear anything.
  
  So, still very anxious to have someone tell me what to do.
  
  Thanks
• 0
  
  HiFiBerry team November 16, 2014 20:50

  Hi Karel,
  
  VLC has to decode the MP3 file to a PCM stream and send it to the sound card. With FLAC this seems to work, but not with MP3. Therefore it looks like it is not able to decode MP3 streams. This might need additional libraries that are not included. Due to patents protecting the MP3 compression some distributions do not include these libraries. I'm not sure if this might be the case with your distribution.
  
  Best regards
  Daniel
• 0
  
  karel November 18, 2014 08:38

  When I run my test.mp3 file off a command line with cvlc, it returns an alsa-error. When I do the same with a FLAC or a WAV file, there is no error and the music starts to play.
  
  The DAC+ is the only audio card that is enabled and when I use either mplayer or mpg321 off a command line, the test.mp3 will play.
  
  Mplayer requires Pulseaudio for it to work, and I have tried removing Pulseaudio from the system-as suggested by some- but no result for VLC.
• 0
  
  HiFiBerry team November 18, 2014 17:52

  Hi Karel,
  
  mplayer shoudl work without pulseaudio. While it always tries to connect to pulseaudio first, it will fall back to ALSA if pulseaudio is not running.
  I can't say, why VLC is not playing MP3, i recommend asking the VLC developers.
  
  Best regards
  Daniel
• 0
  
  Nityesh Schnderbeck March 11, 2016 04:17

  I also had the same problem with my HI-Fi Berry with the DAC+, Playing FLACs and not playing MP3s.

  I found the solution.

  Run VLC with:  "vlc --aout alsa --alsa-audio-device=hw:0,0"  and it will play MP3s.

   

  Make a script

   

  #!/bin/sh
  exec /usr/bin/vlc --aout alsa --alsa-audio-device=hw:0,0 "$@"

   

  save as avlc make executable and copy to /usr/bin and asociaste your sound files to avlc so when you click on your MP3 files they play.

  It sounds incredible.

  Enjoy, and have fun

   

   

  Edited by Nityesh Schnderbeck March 11, 2016 14:31