Long story short, I learned there is an XMMS release of a plugin I use in Winamp for music playback (mp3PRO). Sadly, I recoded most of my music to mp3PRO back in the day, and now I’m stuck using Winamp, even on Linux. I like the player, wouldn’t change it, but I wanted to switch to something native, like Audacious or Qmms. But, this codec is abandonware and it only has a plugin released for XMMS back in 2005 (closed source, of course).
Is there any way I can make this plugin work in any modern player? It’s 32-bit only, but that’s not a problem, I can just use the 32-bit versions of Audacious or Qmms (Void still has 32-bit builds of them in repo)… maybe like a wrapper or something… I would debug and do whatever it needs, I just need some pointers where to start looking and what to do exactly if I’m gonna have a shot at making this work.
I tried loading the plugin in Audacious, it throws and error while loading, something xmms_config related (can’t remember, I’m currently not at the PC I was testing this on), Qmms just says that it can’t load the plugin. I presume GTK+ would be required and I’d bundle whatever libraries it needs with the plugin, just don’t know where to start really… ldd would be a good start I guess, but I didn’t run that 😂.
If your winamp is still functional, I’d just suggest you convert all mp3pro to wav using the disc writer plugin and then use ffmpeg to convert to mp4 or normal mp3.
Then you won’t need to worry about the mp3pro codec issues.
Yeah, but that will be their second conversion thus far… 3rd if you count the original CD it was ripped from 😔. I do wanna avoid that.
At some point you’ll have to use a new codec, even if it’s in 10 years. So it might be a good idea to download the music instead of converting.
Soulseek with Nicotine+ seems to be a good way to download music. Or streamrip/deemix with a (temporary) Deezer/Tidal subscription supports high quality audio.
I was afraid that this might be the only viable solution… I would do it, but it will take A LOT of time.
More time than trying to shoehorn a defunct package for an abandoned codec in to a random player which even if it works would only be a temporary kludge not a fix?
Well, the challenge is interesting though… but yes, you are correct.
It’s going to wav…it’s lossless.
wav takes too much space, the collection will grown 5, 6 times the size… I just don’t have that much online storage at my disposal, my NAS is 4 x 2TB drives in RAID5, I have about 6TB at my disposal for everything (personal stuff as well as media).
You could compress the wav to flac without losing anything. It’ll still be a lot larger that the MP3 though.
Maybe give it a whirl with a few and see how it works out.
Maybe… I could try FLAC, that might be a more viable option.
If it doesn’t work out or you find yourself tight on space in the future you can always recompress to mp3 or ogg and take the quality hit at that point.
Well it’s Black Friday and HDDs are going for cheap. 6TB is nothing these days, when you could get a 16TB external drive for only $200, or a internal SATA one for $185. Or you could replace/supplement your entire NAS with a single 6TB drive for only $50.
Disk space is cheap now, so upgrade your storage, convert your music to FLAC, problem solved.
Ummm… I don’t live in the US and $50 is A LOT for me. My monthly salary is about $500. All of these 2TB drives are used and dicomissioned (replaced for larger one, they’re from work). I just don’t have the funds to replace them. The NAS is DIY as well.
And drives are not that cheap around here. They are, but not as cheap as in the US. SSDs are about the same price though… but our salaries are not.
Well you don’t have to buy them brand new. If you guys have a used goods market there, you could look around for some good deals on used drives there. Or even used PCs, sometime people sell entire PCs for the same cost as a hard drive, so look out for those and take the drives out, sell the rest of parts.
And if things are really desperate money wise, it doesn’t even have to be a hard drive, you could even store your music on CDs/DVDs - not the most convenient option I know, but it’s an option - you could move the music that you don’t listen to often (or music that you’re tired of playing constantly), and keep your more frequently played music on the HDDs.
One thing I’ve learned over the years dealing with PC tech is that spinning drives is the one thing you absolutely don’t buy second hand. Plus, you can’t find 4TB or above drives second hand here. People use them till they die or repurpose them.
Second hand PC parts are generally overpriced here. People wanna get like 70, 80% of the price they paid for them. There are some reasonable sellers, but as I said, they usually don’t sell drives or sell drives that no one would need anyway (250GB, 500GB, 1TB spinning drives).
Your last suggestion is kinda good to be honest, I might opt for that.
I think this actually depends on a lot of things. I have an old Dell rack server and I buy ex-enterprise SAS drives for it. I use them in RAID arrays with dedicated hot spares and cold spares on standby. The eBay seller I buy from replaced a drive for free once when it was “error predicted” on arrival.
That particular conversion is lossless but the original MP3 Pro file is lossy and converting to MP3 again would be double lossy. Best solution is to rerip or download a good copy.
Unless you still have the original source, you’re gonna need to accept this.
Stop putting up a barrier and accept that you have defunct files and fix that.
I have the original source for some of them, but very few, like maybe 1 or 2%.
Doesn’t matter, I’m just gonna redownload them in flac, store them on optical media as flac and keep them as HE-AAC on my NAS for local playback. It’s the only option that’s acceptable in my mind.
Sounds like a good plan there 👌 Good luck.