ucantblamem

Musicadium has been a fairly significant focus for the development team here at SM2 for a while now. One of things I’m working on at the moment is putting together a library to manage the cross-coding of sound files for the various stores we supply content to.

Although we’re not actually going to be using this tool, I was playing around with the FAAC/FAAD encoding/decoding on Ubuntu-server and ran into some issues which I thought I’d share in-case other people have had them also.

To install these tools you will need to enable the multiverse.

And run these commands to install the necessary packages:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install faac
sudo apt-get install faad

Now, they’re installed and ready to go. To learn how to use them just do:

faad -h

The problem I was having was that everytime I went to use FAAD, it would give me this error:

faad: symbol lookup error: faad: undefined symbol: faacDecGetCapabilities

After some time Google-ing around, I found this post, which helped me to track down the problem. I ran this in the command line:

ldd /usr/bin/faad

NOTE: - ldd prints the linked libraries used by a particular command line tool.

and then:

grep faacDecGetCapabilities /usr/lib/libfaad*

NOTE: - grep is a regular expression tool.

Which showed me that they were using different versions of the libraries (the paths were different). This is probably due to the fact that this was on a box that was upgraded from 7.04 to 7.10 server. In any case, my quick fix was just to copy the newer library over the old one:

cp /usr/lib/libfaad.so.0 /usr/local/lib/libfaad.so.0

And FAAD started working! Keep in mind that libfaad.so.0 is a shared library and you could damage something else on your system by doing this, but considering this was a server that doesn’t play audio it wasn’t an issue in my instance.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 at 10:09 pm and is filed under General, Programming, Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.