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 😂.
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.