# HME music players and AAC



## perrce (Feb 8, 2007)

Has anyone found a solution for transcoding AAC music files (ala iTunes) into MP3 files in Java? 

I realize this is more of a Java question than HME, so let me narrow it: Does anyone know of an HME app that plays AAC files? I thought AudioFaucet did, but now I think that it just interfaces with iTunes. (Not really what I'm looking for.) I know about Dan's plugin for TiVoDesktop, but after emailing with him, that looks like it won't be too applicable to HME.

I'm thinking about doing AAC in Harmonium, so I'm looking for someone else's code that I can look at. (I'd much rather follow someone else's trail of breadcrumbs then be the pioneer myself.) My Googling has not been promising, but I'm hoping that I missed something that one of you know about.


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## gonzotek (Sep 24, 2004)

perrce said:


> Has anyone found a solution for transcoding AAC music files (ala iTunes) into MP3 files in Java?
> 
> I realize this is more of a Java question than HME, so let me narrow it: Does anyone know of an HME app that plays AAC files? I thought AudioFaucet did, but now I think that it just interfaces with iTunes. (Not really what I'm looking for.) I know about Dan's plugin for TiVoDesktop, but after emailing with him, that looks like it won't be too applicable to HME.
> 
> I'm thinking about doing AAC in Harmonium, so I'm looking for someone else's code that I can look at. (I'd much rather follow someone else's trail of breadcrumbs then be the pioneer myself.) My Googling has not been promising, but I'm hoping that I missed something that one of you know about.


Have you run across JAVE? I was going to suggest interfacing with an ffmpeg binary on each target platform, and happened to run across JAVE. It's a java wrapper for doing just that. It looks possible that you could support Windows/Mac/Linux using it, with a bit of extra work required for Mac.

pyTiVo uses ffmpeg for audio transcoding, but it deals directly with ffmpeg binaries. Depending on how complex JAVE is to work with (I'm neither familiar with it nor proficient in java), you could skip it and deal do the same as pytivo. The pytivo source for the audio plugin is easy enough to follow.

Either way, bringing in ffmpeg for transcoding would make many other formats for usable in Harmonium. Besides aac, lots of people have ogg vorbis, unencrypted wma, and lossless codecs like flac; ffmpeg can transcode all of them to mp3.


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## perrce (Feb 8, 2007)

gonzotek said:


> Have you run across JAVE?


I had not. I'll check it out. Thanks.

FFMPEG is what I've been looking at. That or just going directly to FAAD/LAME. Java support for audio/video really sucks. FMJ is a joke. There are a few different open source re-implementations of FMJ that are not yet ready for prime time. And anything that I might think about implementing myself is undocumented and covered by patents anyway.


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## perrce (Feb 8, 2007)

Wow. JAVE is sooooo easy to use! Thanks for the tip. Now if I can just get it working with HME...


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## jlb (Dec 13, 2001)

Dan's plugin works great, and I combine that with TiviTunes for a simple solution to non DRM AAC. Now, if there was a legit and easy way to play DRM-AAC without Apple TV or more hardware......


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