WMA support

[esmadja]

How do you get wma support?
I’ve downloaded version 0.2.1.1 and modified the mt-daapd.conf file to change the config parameter for extention
from: extensions .mp3,.m4a,.m4p
to: extensions .mp3,.m4a,.m4p,.wma
but still when it scans the music database it doesn’t find WMA files.

I’ve seen posts of success, but no information of how it was done.

[rpedde]

First, know that it’s not point-and-click… it’s still pretty bleeding edge, but here’s the terse WMA HOWTO:

1. You’ll need to download a recent nightly. http://nightlies.mt-daapd.org.
2. Compile and install it
3. copy contrib/mt-daapd.conf to /etc/mt-daapd.conf
4. add .wma to your “extensions”
5. add .wma to your “ssc_extensions”
6. point your ssc_prog to a script that will convert .wma to wav.
7. profit!

#6 is the hard part. You might take the mt-daapd-ssc.pl and add something like:

} elseif ($fn =~ m/^..*.wma$/i) {

ffmpeg_proc($fn, $off, $forgelen);

}

in the part that dispatches the file types.

Drawbacks include the fact that it won’t do wma lossless, since ffmpeg doesn’t do wma lossless… the only way I know to do wma lossless is mplayer with win32 codecs, which means you can only do wma lossless on x86 (linux x86, probably… I don’t know how the win32 codec stuff works, but I’d guess it’s probably linux x86 only.)

But to do that, you need to use mplayer, not ffmpeg, and you’ll need patches to the stock mplayer.

Here’s the patches to mplayer:

http://www.mikeyp.com/weblog/linux/mplayersilent.html

So just wma isn’t so bad, but lossless wma takes some serious effort. It’s possible that the patches mentioned are going upstream to the mplayer folks, so that ought to make it a little easier. That, or if ffmpeg gets wma lossless support, that will make it easier as well.

Anyway, that’s the executive summary. Yell if you need something more verbose than this.

— Ron

Post edited by: rpedde, at: 2005/05/10 03:20

[esmadja]

Thank-you for the super quick response.

I had figured out that I need the most recent nightly. Fun thing is that using a Roku M500 Soundbridge from a NSLU2 I didn’t have to do any of the changes you referred to above. All I did was add WMA to extensions.
Kind of strange.
Even funnier is that I had to start mt-daapd 3 times before it would actually work. Seems sometimes it pays to be stuborn 😀

[rpedde]

Hrm.

I guess if all else fails, kick it. 🙂

— Ron

[velociped]

Martin,

That is correct. The “Music formats” section of this Roku Labs FAQ lists all of the file types supported on the SoundBridge.

Herman

[rpedde]

You’ll still want nightlies, though, because that will read the tags on wma files and let you browse better. But you don’t have to put it in ssc_extensions. Correct.

[rpedde]

Actually, the transcoding architecture changed just recently so that it determined whether or not to transcode when the client gets the song list.

So it would be possible to choose to transcode or not transcode based on user-agent.

That’s the plan, anyway. I’m not going to implement it until the configuration gets moved into the database, though.

— Ron

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