WMA Lossless in Amarok with 64-bit distribution
 

Hi all,

I was wondering if anyone has had success playing WMA lossless files with Amarok in the 64-bit Slackware distribution. When I try to play a file in my library in this format, it just zips through the file without playing anything then keeps zipping through my music collection until it finds an MP3 file, then starts playing. I posted in the KDE forums and was told that I was missing a codec. I found the w32codec package and installed it, but these files still will not play (I have also tried to play them through xine and it does not play them either).

I am wondering if this is because I am running the 64-bit distribution and maybe the codecs only work in 32-bit? I tried to search for w64codec but can't find anything for Slackware. I have not had my Linux system up very long so it would not be a big deal to wipe the drive and install the 32-bit distribution, but before I do I want to know if the 64-bit distribution is the problem. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Tom

Are you certain this WMA file was not copy-protected (DRM) ?

Yes. These are songs ripped from my own CDs. When I am in Windows Media Player and look under Media Usage Rights for the song I have been trying to test in Amarok, it says "This file is not protected."

BTW, the sample music files that come with Media Player are "lossy" WMA and they play OK. It is strictly the "lossless" ones that cause trouble.

Tom

I haven't tried playing a lossless WMA file, though I've encountered the fast playback/skip of copy-protected lossy WMA's.

Well, I was having no luck with the 64-bit distribution so I decided to go ahead and wipe it out and try the 32-bit and see if that worked. It still didn't work out of the box, so I installed w32codec on the 32-bit system. When I went into xine to set it up to find the new codecs, I found an option that wasn't present under 64-bit: path to win32 codecs. It was even already set for me. Once I put the w32codec files in the directory it pointed to and restarted Amarok, the WMA lossless files played fine. So based on these findings, I think that the 32-bit distribution is the way to go for playing WMA lossless. Even if I had found a w64codec package, there is no corresponding option in the 64-bit version of xine to point to a path to win64 codecs. I only went with the 64-bit distribution in the first place because my computer has 4GB of memory and I can only access about 3.5GB with a 32-bit OS. I don't think it is a really big loss, though, because Linux doesn't tend to be a memory hog.

Tom