2.6-a3 needs ffmpeg to see .m4a

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2.6-alpha3 won't show any .m4a files if ffmpeg is not among its decoder plugins.

This despite the following configuration in ~/.moc/config :

PreferredDecoders = m4a(aac,*)

and with 'aac' among the decoder plugins configured-in, built and installed.

If this is intended behavior, it should probably be noted in the documentation and/or stock config file, because the examples in the file comments lead me to believe that the Faad2-based AAC decoder plugin should manage the m4a files by itself.

Mocp built from source on:

Linux <localhost> 4.9.0-8-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 4.9.130-2 (2018-10-27) x86_64 GNU/Linux

PreferredDecoders only manages the order in which decoders are tried, it doesn't add an extension to the list of recognised ones. From what I see in the code, FAAD decoder recognises only .aac files:

static int aac_our_format_ext (const char *ext) { return !strcasecmp (ext, "aac"); }

I don't know if it would be able to decode .m4a files (it is aac file embedded in m4a container and I don't know if FAAD is able to handle this).

Another thing might be to change the behaviour of PreferredDecoders option to be able to force a certain decoder to try to open files with given extensions. That might be useful in some use cases.