nero aac as deb package

[snherbst]

I have a question relating if somebody has thought about to make nero-aac deb package available in some of the repositories like debian-multimedia or medibuntu.
Nero states explicit in their license.txt file

This License does not provide any rights to reproduce and/or distribute this software package in whole or in any part.

with regards to this is it possible to release this package in another package and at another location.
Besides it's rather simple to make your own package.

PS: Besides I find it also rather buggy that the nero-aac name convention is with CapitalLetters when almost anything else in Linux is lower-case.

[fibbingbear]

is it possible to release this package in another package and at another location.

I don't mean to be rude, but please read what you just wrote:
This License does not provide any rights to reproduce and/or distribute this software package in whole or in any part.

So you are not legally allowed to re-distribute it as outlined in the license, which means no Debian packages. Of course, you could always make one and distribute it, but if you're sued, there's a near 100% chance you'll lose the court case.

Still, even if Nero allowed the re-distribution, I bet it'd still be a no-go for Debian. It's not open source.

[snherbst]

Sorry if that what I was writing was a bit confusing.
The actual idea was if it could be in anyway possible to have NeroAac in any of the multimedia repositories. So that you just have to open Synaptic or adaptmanager make a search on "aac" and there you go. Or just type
"apt-get install nero-aac" and you got your package inclusive the updates.
Actually Debian-Multimedia has a aacplusenc available have a look at this place
http://www.debian-multimedia.org/dists/unstable/Contents-i386.
the package is also in testing

[fibbingbear]

The answer is no for two reasons:

1.) The person who added it to the repository would be liable to be sued by Nero.

2.) Since they're Windows binaries, they wouldn't run on all systems. The source code would need to be available so it could be compiled to different systems.

There are open-source equivalents for AAC encoding (like FAAC) that are listed in Debian/Ubuntu, but they are typically not as good as Nero's encoder (though some may disagree --- I personally like Nero's more).

[snherbst]

2.) Since they're Windows binaries, they wouldn't run on all systems. The source code would need to be available so it could be compiled to different systems.

it's not correctly The latest NeroDigitalAudio.zip is from here:
http://www.nero.com/eng/nero-aac-codec.html
Here you have a list of this NeroDigitalAudio.zip

xxx-pc:/data/download/linux/sound# unzip -l NeroDigitalAudio.zip
Archive: NeroDigitalAudio.zip
Length Date Time Name
-------- ---- ---- ----
1692 08-06-07 10:48 changelog.txt
4112 07-20-07 09:48 license.txt
2584 08-06-07 10:48 readme.txt
0 08-06-07 11:11 linux/
725706 08-06-07 11:10 linux/neroAacDec
973300 08-06-07 11:10 linux/neroAacEnc
0 08-06-07 11:08 win32/
425984 08-06-07 10:44 win32/neroAacDec.exe
1081344 08-06-07 10:44 win32/neroAacEnc.exe
1744896 08-06-07 11:06 win32/neroAacEnc_SSE.exe
373248 08-06-07 10:44 win32/neroAacTag.exe
-------- -------
5332866 11 files

So as you can see there is actually Linux binaries in the zip file. So it's just to create some man pages and build the whole in a deb package.

[microchip8]

@snherbst

don't you get it already? the license doesn't allow you to do that without asking Nero first

[snherbst]

Sorry I was commenting on the linux binaries for the for the NeroDigitalAudio . I just see this as their is not many Debian/Ubuntu users around as you tow don't positively mean that this is any at all god idea.

[menno]

Note that distributing AAC binaries probably also means you have to pay patent licenses. So even if we did allow redistribution, you probably wouldn't want to.
Another problem with redistribution is that it would allow software other than just linux distributions to include our encoder.

PS: I don't see what's the bug in using an upper case character?

[snherbst]

@menno
You got a point.
So why don't you make a deb package ?. and place it at you location?. the only thing the visitors have to do is download and install it.

Regarding Capitalized letters it a bit harder to write neroAacEnc than to write nero-acc-enc. Linux Ext3 FS is case-sensitive. In windows FAT or NTFS it doesn't matter if you write neroaacenc, NEROAACENC or nEROaACeNC.
Please read this good article about this matter
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/past-present-future-file-systems.ars/5
and besides try make an ls -1 /bin or some other place in your system you will see that there is primarily no Capital letters no at all.

[Sharktooth]

ls -l... maybe.
also your signature is wrong: try "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade" (without "").
about license issues. every country has a different law on copyright and software distribution.
if you host your repository in sweden or in italy, for example, you can safely redistribute the nero aac encoder .deb packages. you should warn foreign users though...

[fibbingbear]

it's not correctly The latest NeroDigitalAudio.zip is from here:
http://www.nero.com/eng/nero-aac-codec.html
Here you have a list of this NeroDigitalAudio.zip

xxx-pc:/data/download/linux/sound# unzip -l NeroDigitalAudio.zip
Archive: NeroDigitalAudio.zip
Length Date Time Name
-------- ---- ---- ----
1692 08-06-07 10:48 changelog.txt
4112 07-20-07 09:48 license.txt
2584 08-06-07 10:48 readme.txt
0 08-06-07 11:11 linux/
725706 08-06-07 11:10 linux/neroAacDec
973300 08-06-07 11:10 linux/neroAacEnc
0 08-06-07 11:08 win32/
425984 08-06-07 10:44 win32/neroAacDec.exe
1081344 08-06-07 10:44 win32/neroAacEnc.exe
1744896 08-06-07 11:06 win32/neroAacEnc_SSE.exe
373248 08-06-07 10:44 win32/neroAacTag.exe
-------- -------
5332866 11 files

So as you can see there is actually Linux binaries in the zip file. So it's just to create some man pages and build the whole in a deb package.

Sorry about that, I forgot about the Linux binaries. Still, I can't imagine the Debian community being too excited about close-source binaries.

[snherbst]

ls -l... maybe.
also your signature is wrong: try "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade" (without "").
Actually "apt-get update; apt-get upgrade" (without "") works the command interpreter takes each ; as a new line try this

xxx-pc:/home/sten# echo "hi there";echo "hi there";echo "hi there"
hi there
hi there
hi there


Regarding this

about license issues. every country has a different law on copyright and software distribution.
if you host your repository in sweden or in italy, for example, you can safely redistribute the nero aac encoder .deb packages. you should warn foreign users though...
I was at last actually asking menno if he could get nero to make their own deb package hosting like here
http://www.nero.com/eng/downloads-linux3-trial.php

Besides the Nero Linux package doesn't have all lowercase but also Capitalized Naming.
Try download nerolinux-3.5.0.1-x86.deb and type in:
dpkg-deb -c nerolinux-3.5.0.1-x86.deb

To the folks over at nero besides nice job with the Nero Linux looks great. And I will give a great thank for you release of NeroDigitalAudio for Linux.

[Gusar]

There's one thing that hasn't been mentioned. There are .deb packages that don't contain any files themselves, just information on them. So a nero .deb package would first display the Nero AAC license and when the user agrees to it, it would fetch the files from a Nero mirror.

The purpose? Exposure. If the AAC encoder is listed in the package manager, more people would know about it and install it. In the end, it might result in a few purchases of NeroLinux.

[menno]

Creating our own deb and rpm packages is no problem I guess, probably it's even a good idea to separate the linux and windows binaries completely.
If there is some way to let repositories know about the location of the binaries on some other server (Nero) as mentioned, I would be glad to investigate if we could support this.

[snherbst]

@menno
There is of cause http://www.debian.org/
here is a list of devel people here http://www.debian.org/devel/people

And you can contact http://www.ubuntu.com/
And you can contact them here http://www.ubuntu.com/aboutus/contactus
There is a developers lists here https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuDevelopers

The third parties repositories are
http://www.debian-multimedia.org/
http://www.medibuntu.org/
which also can be contacted.

PS: Glad to see that there's good progress here :)

[MetalheadGautham]

I personally feel that there is no actual "need" to create a seperate deb package for Nero AAC. NeroAacEnc and NeroAacDec are the only files that you will need to use NeroAacEnc, and all you need to do is to put it in the bin folder to be able to use it via the console.

Now, a .deb package from Nero will just do this thing for you. And as it will be a download from the nero website, instead of being in the repos, there is no distinct advantage over manual placement of the executables in the bin folder. If you argue that a newbie user won't be able to do such an operation, then I would like to remind you that a user with such a level of experience will never touch commandline programs anyway, so a .deb still will look like a white elephant.

What could be done however is that the website could seperate the files for different platforms and offer them seperately, for the benifit of the 28kbps dialup users(if there still exist any), the tagging utility also be made available for linux, and some man pages created for the benifit of the users(although the executable itself has complete usage doccumentation.

offtopic:
why does ubuntu report that a file encoded with nero aac is 3GP multimedia ? On examination, I discovered that nero aac uses the 3GP container instead of the standard mp4 container. Any reasons ?

[snherbst]

I personally feel that there is no actual "need" to create a seperate deb package for Nero AAC. NeroAacEnc and NeroAacDec are the only files that you will need to use NeroAacEnc, and all you need to do is to put it in the bin folder to be able to use it via the console.
Lets say youre right, But how many newbees have any clue of doing that? I want free software rules and take in precaution that there is newbees around including novices (some people in the pc world never get anything than novice). If you are doing it the package way the placement of the files is standardized and other apps can rely on that the place where it's put is the same as always. If you're doing it your way newbees/novices dont have a chance and we all go scripting around. How many newbees do you thing can do this the first time:
http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=K3b_and_Nero_AAC

Now, a .deb package from Nero will just do this thing for you. And as it will be a download from the nero website, instead of being in the repos, there is no distinct advantage over manual placement of the executables in the bin folder. If you argue that a newbie user won't be able to do such an operation, then I would like to remind you that a user with such a level of experience will never touch commandline programs anyway, so a .deb still will look like a white elephant.It looks like the file as Gusar and menno mentioned will find some way into the repositories maybe in debian non-free or some other place, but not as a finished deb package. On the other hand Ahead/Nero could make their own repo and we could just include them in our sources.list like wine had done take a look here http://www.winehq.org/site/download-deb. We even have the opportunity to download NeroLinux with this package.

What could be done however is that the website could seperate the files for different platforms and offer them seperately, for the benifit of the 28kbps dialup users(if there still exist any), the tagging utility also be made available for linux, and some man pages created for the benifit of the users(although the executable itself has complete usage doccumentation. The package as it is now is 2.5MB in size not that big at all for a one time download each time you install a new system. On the other hand as you mentioned would the nerotag be missing, but there are other tagging utilities around from http://mpeg4ip.net/ there is the mpeg4ip-utils package a binary file named mpeg4tags which is suitable for this task.

[WalterK]

Dumb question , but isn't there already an aac encoder and decoder for linux, faac and faad?
Is the nero version that much better?

[fibbingbear]

Dumb question , but isn't there already an aac encoder and decoder for linux, faac and faad?
Is the nero version that much better?

Well, everyone has their own personal preference, and I'm a big fan of the Nero encoder. From what I've read at Hydrogen Audio, it seems like people think that Nero is better is than FAAC.

[WalterK]

I am afraid my ears are not sensitive enough to hear the difference between the various audio formats except by bitrate and audio normalization, not format type.
I only have ogg and flac for music, and when encoding/transcoding video to non dvd output its mostly mp3 for the audiotrack format.

[snherbst]

Dumb question , but isn't there already an aac encoder and decoder for linux, faac and faad?
Is the nero version that much better?
Read about faac here http://www.audiocoding.com. Faac is not using any features like he or aac-plus read further in general -> Audio encoding -> (Sticky) Audio Faq and find AAC FAQ.
And have a look here:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=88775
:search:

[MetalheadGautham]

Lets say youre right, But how many newbees have any clue of doing that? I want free software rules and take in precaution that there is newbees around including novices (some people in the pc world never get anything than novice). If you are doing it the package way the placement of the files is standardized and other apps can rely on that the place where it's put is the same as always. If you're doing it your way newbees/novices dont have a chance and we all go scripting around. How many newbees do you thing can do this the first time:
http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=K3b_and_Nero_AAC

I am not sure how this will be applicable here, but I have to confess that till a few months ago, I myself was a novice. And now, by my experience, I can confirm that a little asking and reading can make anyone do tasks such as these. Packages place the apps in standardised locations, agreed. But I too said bin folder, which itself is supposed to be one of the (three ?) standard places to put your apps in.

The point is simple: in this particular context, there are just two tiny executables that get updated once in a blue moon. I am sure it won't take much trouble to do this. Even as a newbie, I just read through ubuntu guide about the use of sudo, did a sudo natulius(though later I realised that gksu must be used) and from there, moved these files to the bin folder.

It looks like the file as Gusar and menno mentioned will find some way into the repositories maybe in debian non-free or some other place, but not as a finished deb package. On the other hand Ahead/Nero could make their own repo and we could just include them in our sources.list like wine had done take a look here http://www.winehq.org/site/download-deb. We even have the opportunity to download NeroLinux with this package.

nero making their own repo on the other hand, is a good idea, as its TRUELY newbie friendly. A distribution could come with nero aac preinstalled, and the user could just use the updating program to install updates to this program along with others.

But we still need a GUI for the program either in the distro or in the repos, as newbies under several definations tend to get unnerved by commandline. But this is out of topic and fixable, so I am jumping over this issue.
The package as it is now is 2.5MB in size not that big at all for a one time download each time you install a new system. On the other hand as you mentioned would the nerotag be missing, but there are other tagging utilities around from http://mpeg4ip.net/ there is the mpeg4ip-utils package a binary file named mpeg4tags which is suitable for this task.
you yourself said this is n00bland. Do you think a newbie who just wants to rip his cd onto his iPod without any hastles in Nero AAC format will want to bother with a bunch of commandline programs ?

[snherbst]

But we still need a GUI for the program either in the distro or in the repos, as newbies under several definations tend to get unnerved by commandline. But this is out of topic and fixable, so I am jumping over this issue. I dont think that there is any use of an GUI you don't see a GUI for LAME so this command line tool could just use one of the frontends that already available.

you yourself said this is n00bland. Do you think a newbie who just wants to rip his cd onto his iPod without any hastles in Nero AAC format will want to bother with a bunch of commandline programs ?There should not be any problems if there are some god frontends. Besides If you use an iPod there is the opportunity to use amarok with a soundKonverter script this will do the job for you , I haven't tried this yet with amarok.