How to play MMS Audio files (.amr) on Sailfish OS
Sailfish OS cannot natively play MMS audio files, but there's a way to do it, let's see how in this article!
MMS Audio files?
Yes! Apparently it's a thing!
I usually have those on Telegram,
but someone sent me an Audio file via MMS this week, and when I tried to listen
to it, Sailfish OS' Media player returned an error message:
"Unsupported coded: Adaptive Multi Rate (AMR) decoder..."
Sailfish OS forum to the rescue!
My first reflex was to look that up on the SFOS Forum, and surely enough, there was already a thread about it here.
How to fix
Basically, you need to install:
- 2 opencore AMR libraries,
- as well as a gstreamer AMR plugin.
Getting the packages
Being on a Xperia 10 III, I'm on a 64 bits version of Sailfish OS, meaning that getting those packages is a bit trickier.
Note you'll need wget
to download them, which you'll have to install with
pkcon install wget
(although you could also use curl
, which comes
preinstalled with SFOS).
wget https://ftp.uni-erlangen.de/packman/suse/openSUSE_Leap_15.4/Essentials/aarch64/libopencore-amrnb0-0.1.5-pm154.1.1.aarch64.rpm
wget https://ftp.uni-erlangen.de/packman/suse/openSUSE_Leap_15.4/Essentials/aarch64/libopencore-amrwb0-0.1.5-pm154.1.1.aarch64.rpm
wget https://openrepos.net/sites/default/files/packages/7598/gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly-amr-1.18.5-2.aarch64.rpm
Installing them
Nothing fancy, just use rpm -Uvh
:
rpm -Uvh libopencore-amrnb0-0.1.5-pm154.1.1.aarch64.rpm
rpm -Uvh libopencore-amrwb0-0.1.5-pm154.1.1.aarch64.rpm
rpm -Uvh gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly-amr-1.18.5-2.aarch64.rpm
Work around SailJail!
Then I tried to read the MMS again, but it still failed - that was because the Media app couldn't access the file.
So you just have to fix it by editing SailJail's permission for the Media app:
vi /etc/sailjail/permissions/Music.permission
and adding this line at the end of the file:
whitelist ${HOME}/.local/share/commhistory/data
(Note that you'll need to know how to use vi
for that).
Once this is done, you can finally listen to this super important MMS Audio file! ;)
Wrap Up
Not a big deal in the end - huge thanks to the folks in the SFOS Forum thread, and especially to "wetab73" who summed up his findings, and "lpr" who made the above AMR plugin available.
Tags: SailfishOS