On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 12:43 PM, Eric Steinberg &lt;eric.steinberg(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: mencoder will convert just about any audio to ac3. I have heard of trouble using mencoder to make mpeg for dvd burning, but you should be able to at least convert the audio from pcm to ac3 using mencoder (I think your command line options would end up being something like "mencoder <foo.wav> -ovc null -oac lavc -lavcopts acodec=ac3". I am not totally sure how to handle not having a video stream for the conversion (perhaps mplayer is needed with the -dumpaudio option?). The command line is a bit hairy for mencoder but I am sure there is a way to make it do what you want here). _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user(a)lists.linuxaudio.org http://lists.linuxaudio.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-audio-user

On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 3:43 PM, Eric Steinberg &lt;eric.steinberg(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: I have reimplemented ac3jack completely, but have not yet released it officially or updated the web site. I need a kick in the pants to do it. Anyway, here's all you need: The new version has a GUI (ac3jack) as well as a cmdline version (ac3jack_cli), plus OSC control, but best of all integrates the realtime ALSA output to SPDIF. The downside is that it has a few more dependencies. It no longer uses ffmpeg, instead using the newer and more actively developed Aften. I've made an SVN snapshot of Aften that you'll need to use instead of their release version. AC3Jack 2 source: http://essej.net/ac3jack/ac3jack-2.0.0alpha3.tar.gz Aften source: http://essej.net/ac3jack/aften-20071020.tar.gz You need 'cmake' to build aften. Once you have that, the quick build instructions are: $ cd aften-20071020 $ mkdir build $ cd build $ cmake .. $ make [become root] # make install # cp libaften_static.a /usr/local/lib/ The other dependencies you'll need are boost, wxWidgets, libsigc++-1.2, and liblo (all of which are described in the README) and most of which should be available from your distribution's repositories. Building ac3jack is a straightforward ./configure; make; make install, as usual. If you are trying out realtime spdif output, I'd especially like your feedback on how your sound card's SPDIF is presented in the GUI, because I have not been able to test it with many different setups. Thanks in advance, please let me know if you have any problems. The documentation is still a work in progress (and only exists in the README for the time being, the website is still the old one). jlc

Of course you can use whatever libraries you like in your software, and perhaps Aften fits ac3jack better in some way, but I think you need to come up with a better excuse for not using ffmpeg other than it being (to paraphrase per implication) "old and not actively developed". Especially since you're using a snapshot of Aften that's eight months old.