Re: [Sheflug] Wma files.

[Chris Warburton <chriswarbo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 2007-04-05 at 21:04 +0100, Douglas G Mckendrick wrote:
> After downloading some bought music, to my horror they are wma not mp3
> as I thought.  Can anyone recommend a player to play wma files....or
> even a away to change them to mp3?

I used XMMS with the xmms-wma plugin to listen to my brother's
default-Windows-media-encoded files (I say 'used' because the quality
was terrible so I just borrowed the CDs, but payed-for ones should have
fine quality).

Searching about for a few mins I have found this
http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/xmms-wma/ for Fedora-type distros,
and it seems that it's in Debian
http://packages.debian.org/unstable/sound/xmms-wma but then again, what
isn't? :)

This only works for non-DRM WMAs AFAIK, but I think the point of selling
WMA is to use DRM so they might not play. If they do and you want to
convert them in XMMS's preferences there is a disk writer output which
will save them to Wave format, which you can then encode with whatever
(if they are lossless WMA you are probably in luck, and could even
convert them to FLAC, if they're not then you will lose some quality as
you are transcoding lossy>lossy. If you really want to keep the WMA
quality then you could always use FLAC on them to ensure you don't cut
out anything, but they would probably take up far too much room)

Hope it helps,
Chris Warburton


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