Many years ago, FAAD had a serious ABI bug: the NeAACDecInit()
prototype in its header declared the "samplerate" parameter to be
"unsigned long *", but internally, the function assumed it was
"uint32_t *" instead. On 32 bit machines, that was no difference, but
on 64 bit, this left one portion of the return value uninitialized;
and worse, on big-endian, the wrong word was filled. This bug had to
be worked around in MPD (commit 9c4e97a6).
A few months later, the bug was fixed in the FAAD CVS in commit 1.117
on file libfaad/decoder.c; the commit message was:
"Use public headers internally to prevent duplicate declarations"
The commit message was too brief at best; the problem was not
duplicate declarations, but a prototype mismatch. No mention of the
bug fix in the ChangeLog.
The MPD project never learned about this bug fix, and so MPD would
always pass a "uin32_t *" dressed up as a "unsigned long *". Nearly 6
years later, it's about time to fix this second ABI problem. Let's
kill the workaround!
Pulseaudio expects clients to specify their channel-map if the
default (ALSA) map does not route the audio to the expected speakers.
Many Google results suggest dealing with this by re-routing the audio
channels with the appropriate ALSA plugin, but this will then simply
break any clients which expect the default ALSA mapping.
Virtually all media files and codecs, certainly flac, dca, a52, and of
course anything based on Microsoft's WAVEFORMAT_EXTENSIBLE specification,
assume the layout in the table here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surround_sound#Standard_speaker_channels
Fortunately, pulseaudio directly addresses this with a built-in channel
map for WAVE-EX which can be set automatically in the stream sample-spec.
MPD handles all strings in UTF-8 internally. Those decoders which
read Latin-1 tags are supposed to implement the conversion, instead of
passing Latin-1 to TagBuilder::AddItem(). FixTagString() is simply
the wrong place to do that, and hard-coding Latin-1 is kind of
arbitrary.