WMA Lossless transcode is wmal, not wma

[MikeyP]

Just an FYI for those of us transcoding WMA Lossless files from linux:

Using the nightly svn-1523, I was having trouble transcoding WMA Lossless files from mt-daapd on my intel-based linux box to iTunes and Roku. As it turns out, I assumed that having “wma” in the ssc-codectypes field in mt-daapd.conf would cover WMA Lossless files. This is not the case. Firefly wisely treats the various flavors of WMA differently, and considers WMA Lossless as type “wmal”, not “wma”.

So, to make sure mt-daapd transcodes WMA Lossless files, do three things in mt-daapd.conf:

– Add “.wma” to the “extensions =” line
– Add “wma,wmal” to the “ssc-codectypes” line for both WMA and WMA Lossless
– Use the provided perl script mt-daapd-ssc.pl in the “ssc-prog” line

If you have mplayer working with WMA Lossless files, and everything is set up as above, mt-daapd should properly transcode WMA Lossless files to iTunes and Roku.

As always, thanks to Ron for providing this support!

[rpedde]

@MikeyP wrote:

Just an FYI for those of us transcoding WMA Lossless files from linux:

Using the nightly svn-1523, I was having trouble transcoding WMA Lossless files from mt-daapd on my intel-based linux box to iTunes and Roku. As it turns out, I assumed that having “wma” in the ssc-codectypes field in mt-daapd.conf would cover WMA Lossless files. This is not the case. Firefly wisely treats the various flavors of WMA differently, and considers WMA Lossless as type “wmal”, not “wma”.

So, to make sure mt-daapd transcodes WMA Lossless files, do three things in mt-daapd.conf:

– Add “.wma” to the “extensions =” line
– Add “wma,wmal” to the “ssc-codectypes” line for both WMA and WMA Lossless
– Use the provided perl script mt-daapd-ssc.pl in the “ssc-prog” line

If you have mplayer working with WMA Lossless files, and everything is set up as above, mt-daapd should properly transcode WMA Lossless files to iTunes and Roku.

As always, thanks to Ron for providing this support!

From the FYI department, WMA voice is “wmav”, and WMA Pro is “wmap” as well.

— Ron

[MikeyP]

As a side note, I discovered this by sprinkling some debug output lines in the function _plugin_ssc_transcode. Have you considered adding some output there for debug lvl 9?

(Yeah, I know, I should have checked scan-wma.c first… 😕 )

-MikeyP

[rpedde]

@MikeyP wrote:

As a side note, I discovered this by sprinkling some debug output lines in the function _plugin_ssc_transcode. Have you considered adding some output there for debug lvl 9?

(Yeah, I know, I should have checked scan-wma.c first… 😕 )

-MikeyP

That or some documentation about the codectype. But that’s going to change some, I think, as right now codectype aligns with the iTunes codectype, and I need something more descriptive. Something along the lines of container/codec, really. So that’s probably going to change some. Until then, i guess I could document it at the wiki. 🙁

[Author]

Posts