DSL Ideas and Suggestions :: XMMS Improvements

mplayer has the ability to play wma files with a simple download of a codec pack.

since you are already downloading the codec pack anyways, you might as well download mplayer too. It's only a few MB.

It's not that hard.

There are so many other more important things that can be added to the base iso besides WMA support, I would not have enough room to type them all here.

Because I was searching for related information, I happened on this thread and am taking the liberty of adding something to it very late, in case it should help someone else.

I downloaded an RPM of xmms-wma v 1.0.5 from the developer's website and extracted from it the file libwma.so. I installed that lone file in /usr/lib/xmms/Input and now my xmms (in DSL v 2.2b) plays wma files.

I would like to be able to convert those wma files into mp3 files and have found some bash scripts which are said to do that. However, they unfortunately depend on using mplayer, rather than xmms. I can't get the mplayer.dsl to work.

I did find the following statement on the Web, "[W]hat you need to do is play the WMA file through something that understands WMA (mplayer, xmms-wma etc) and get the raw PCM output. And then run this raw PCM output through lame ... to get the desired encoding." That suggests to me that xmms with wma support could be used instead of mplayer, but I haven't the skill to achieve the substitution. If anyone else does and were willing to do it, that'd be great.

Quote (lesliek @ May 17 2006,02:09)

I did find the following statement on the Web, "[W]hat you need to do is play the WMA file through something that understands WMA (mplayer, xmms-wma etc) and get the raw PCM output. And then run this raw PCM output through lame ... to get the desired encoding." That suggests to me that xmms with wma support could be used instead of mplayer, but I haven't the skill to achieve the substitution. If anyone else does and were willing to do it, that'd be great.

Use the "disk writer" output in Xmms, which will output to a file instead of just playing the audio.

Thanks very much for drawing my attention to "disk writer", mikshaw. I'll now give that a go.

If you can't play wma with xmms (i have no idea how difficult it is), you might also be able to accomplish the same task with mplayer:

Code Sample

mplayer -ao pcm filename.wma

Code Sample

mplayer -ao pcm:file=filename.wav filename.wma

Code Sample

mplayer -ao pcm:nowaveheader:file=filename.pcm filename.wma

Quote

pcm
raw PCM/wave file writer audio output
(no)waveheader
Include or do not include the wave header (default: included). When not included, raw
PCM will be generated.
file=<filename>
Write the sound to <filename> instead of the default audiodump.wav. If nowaveheader
is specified, the default is audiodump.pcm.

Use the command mplayer -ao help to see if the pcm/wave file writer was compiled into mplayer

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