Can't stream AAC radio

Roon Core Machine

Synology DS1821+, AMD Ryzen V1500B, 32GB RAM

Networking Gear & Setup Details

Fritz!Box 7590, WiFi

Connected Audio Devices

(Airplay to HomePods/HomePods Mini)

Number of Tracks in Library

Description of Issue

I can’t play any AAC streams from radio stations. This seems to be a known issue due to a faulty ffmpeg version supplies by the standard Roon package and a workaround has been provided for QNAP servers.

Only my Synology server, after tinkering with the respective package installation on DSM, I found out that the location that Roon expects to find user provided ffmpeg (or other codecs) is /RoonServer/RoonOnNAS/bin

I downloaded the amd64 version (both static and git) from John van Sickle’s page (John Van Sickle - FFmpeg Static Builds ), I upload the ffmpeg file to that location, restart the Roon package but I still can’t get AAC radio streams to play.

Can someone please help me out?

I thought Roon employees would monitor at least the Support section of the forums but apparently I’m wrong…

Is there a way to contact Roon officially for support?

Unfortunately Roon support has been quite busy with new build roll outs and obviously it’s now Christmas .

Hang in there though, you are in the right place!

Thanks @AceRimmer, let’s see what happens next week.

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Please excuse the naive question…you did decompress twice to get a single ffmpeg file (within the ffmpeg folder)

Yes, I did. Thanks @BrianW for reaching out though, no question is naive!

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Hey @Nikos_Katagas. I looked into the diagnostics for your Roon core, and it looks like Roon is finding ffmpeg in /bin/ffmpeg, and this ffmpeg binary is not working properly.

Looking at the Synology package for Roon, it looks like if ffmpeg is present and executable in RoonOnNAS/bin, it should take precedence over the one in /bin/ffmpeg. I would recommend triple-checking that RoonOnNAS/bin/ffmpeg is present on your USB drive, and that it is marked as executable.

The correct bin directory should have a file called something like “Info about this folder.txt” in it (possibly that name is translated to your language). If that file isn’t there, you’ve got the wrong place.

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Hi @Brian, thank you so much for your answer. It’s pretty dumb on my part in hindsight, but it never occurred to me to check the file’s default permissions! I downloaded a fresh copy, installed it, changed the permission to allow execute, restarted the Roon package and it worked like a charm…

Thanks again for helping me out, @brian. Can I just make a suggestion now that we’ve established the the default ffmpeg is defective, that a working ffmpeg version is included in a future Roon package by default?

We don’t actually ship any ffmpeg with any distribution from Roon Labs. On the majority of installed systems, they are in fact provided by the OS. On Linux systems and NAS’s, we can locate them if they are installed as part of the OS, or otherwise in the PATH environment where Roon is running.

I’m not sure where the defective ffmpeg came from, but it wasn’t ours. We don’t intend to start shipping AAC codecs with Roon in the immediate future.

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