Ubuntu – How to convert audio files in Deadbeef player

convertdeadbeefsound

I t looks like Deadbeef player should convert between different audio formats just by right-clicking and selecting "Convert"

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But after that and a few seconds of delay as if working nothing happens.

Has anybody used it successfully and how?

Best Answer

The deadbeef player's .deb package has some errors in it's control file. It does not properly lists it's dependencies for some of it's components. For example, conversion to .aac format from .mp3 format requires faac, but it doesn't list that.

I played it from terminal and tried to convert a .mp3 file to .aac file. The output is given below:

anwar@anwar:$ /opt/deadbeef/bin/deadbeef 
starting deadbeef 0.5.6 [static]

......
......

selected output plugin: ALSA output plugin
INFO: loading playlist Default
INFO: from file /home/anwar/.config/deadbeef/playlists/0.dbpl
convgui: gtkui plugin not found
plugin Converter GTK3 UI failed to connect to dependencies, deactivated.
plugin Shellexec GTK3 UI failed to connect to dependencies, deactivated.
gtkui: found cover-art loader plugin

And when I clicked on the convert button. The output was as follows:

converter: will encode using: faac -w -o "/home/anwar/fdfd.mp4" -
sh: 1: faac: not found
converter: write error (-1 bytes written out of 8000)

Which clearly indicates, the conversion requires faac package which isn't installed and wasn't in it's dependency list either!

I installed faac package with this command

sudo apt-get install faac

and after installation, the conversion successfully completed and the output was as follows:

converter: will encode using: faac -w -o "/home/anwar/fdfd.mp4" -
Freeware Advanced Audio Coder
FAAC 1.28

Quantization quality: 100
Bandwidth: 16000 Hz
Object type: Low Complexity(MPEG-4) + M/S
Container format: MPEG-4 File Format (MP4)
Encoding - to /home/anwar/fdfd.mp4
 frame | elapsed | play/CPU
  2640 |     2.5 |   24.06x

The list of packages you need for conversion:

  • For AAC - faac package. Install it with 

    sudo apt-get install faac

  • For FLAC - flac package. Install it with 

    sudo apt-get install flac

  • For MP3 - lame package. Install it with 

    sudo apt-get install lame

  • For MS RIFF WAV - No package is needed

  • For MusePack - musepack-tools package. Install it with

    sudo apt-get install musepack-tools

  • For Ogg Vorbis - vorbis-tools package. Install it with

    sudo apt-get install vorbis-tools

  • For wavpack - wavpack package. Install it with 

    sudo apt-get install wavpack

  • For TTA - I didn't find a package for it. But it is very easy to get or compile from source.

    1. Go to this Ubuntu forum post.

    2. Download the attached source of ttaenc package.

    3. Extract it to your home directory.

    4. Open a terminal and go to the extracted folder.

    5. Use these commands to install it

      make
sudo make install

      Now, you can use the TTA conversion also.

For TTA conversion: Credit goes to this forum post

To get the proper file names and to set output location:

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%a - %t [%l] will produce something like Artist - Title [1:23]. More on title formatting, here.

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