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 😂.
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.
Yeah, well, people are not like that around here. Once you buy something 2nd hand, that’s it, you’re stuck with it, no refunds, no replacements.