HI. I have a pretty simple question which should be able to be answered by someone with knowledge of both WINE and Windows Media Audio (WMA) files.

I have my Windows XP partition mounted and I can successfully execute Winamp 2.x within WINE without any problems. The problem is that Winamp will only read the MP3 files and not the WMA files. I assume that this has to do with the win32acm codec because I once successfully got a WMA file to play using mplayer and this codec. There is a thread which I posted about 6 months ago on this very subject located here:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...threadid=23541

So if anyone could tell me how to get a WMA file to play using Winamp within WINE it would be greatly appreciated! And maybe there is the possibility of adding WMA support to XMMS which I really like. Is there any way to rip the code which mplayer uses to play WMA audio and incorporate that into XMMS so that it could play WMA files? I am willing to work on this if anyone is interested. I like XMMS and WMA support would be helpful so that I don't need to run WINE. I'm trying to break free from Windows but for some reason I am always brought back because of one or two necessary features...like I can't browse my online bank statement with any other browser than IE because my bank does not support Mozilla/Netscape, Konqueror, Opera or any other browser!!! Fsck M$!

Kris Hermansen

ugly solution:

export WMA files to WAV files. Compress to mp3 or equilivent.


What you are probably missing is the correct DLL's for winamp on your wine install, or you need to edit your winerc file and tell them to use certain DLL's by default..

if you search for frank's world and wine on google you should turn up a good site about running wine and various different popular windows applications...

1) what's wrong with xmms? it's winamp-by-numbers

2) oh, cos it can't play wma? well use mplayer.

Perhaps you could use this? It's an XMMS plugin that lets you use Winamp plugins... maybe it'd let you use the Winamp-WMA plugin. Or you could just use mplayer!

I finally got it working. Here's what I did.

First I got WINE installed and configured properly with a fake windows directory as C and my NTFS data partition as D. I went out and got the Win32 codecs which were available on the mplayer dowload page. This was just a tar.gz of all the important Win32 dll files and such. I created a windows directory and then a system directory within that. I realize that when Winamp wants to play a WMA file it looks in the C:\windows\system directory so I just copied all the Win32 codecs there and also to /usr/lib/win32 because mplayer requires tham as well. After that I downloaded Winamp 2.81 and 3.0. Then I ran "wine Winamp281.exe" to install to the fake windows directory (~/.wine/C/Program Files/Winamp). I executed Winamp with WINE and it successfully played my WMA files without a hitch. Version 3.0 seems to not work for some reason and crashes unexpectedly. The only problem with Winamp running within WINE is that you can't minimize the window so it always remains on top due to the API that Winamp utilizes (multiple windows). This is very annoying and I am really interested in getting WMA support integrated into XMMS. Someone asked why not just use mplayer, well, mplayer does not have equalization for audio and is not really designed for audio playing. It is more of a video player than an audio player. That's like saying why not just run your avi files with XMMS (which is possible with xmms-avi)? You don't get the advanced configurability with such applications because they are not designed for that specific purpose. So if anyone is interested in helping me add WMA support to XMMS, please let me know. I am not a great programmer, but I have some resources to help me out. If I could just rip some code from mplayer that would work. Or maybe you don't need any code at all and XMMS just needs to be able to call the WMA decoder from /usr/lib/win32. Well, let me know what you guys think...

Kris Hermansen