[PLUG] Playing .wma: A Reference For The Rest Of Us

[Rich Shepard]

   Well! I finally got it all working ... I think. I don't know if the 'wma'
are supposed to include video with the audio, but the process I found creates
large mp3 files which are only audio. That's OK with me; I don't know that
looking at people speaking adds much to the content's value.

   Here's what I did:

   1.) Set up Firefox to use ximms to process .wma files. When I tried this, I
discovered that the files were not run, but were copied to disk.

   2.) Went hunting on Google and learned that it's a rather involved process
to convert .wma to .mp3 (stupid Winduhs stuff). Requires Mplayer and lame,
plus libtheora and cdparanoia (which I didn't discover until later in the
process). Went to linuxpackages.net and got mplayer, mplayer_codecs, and lame;
installed same. Went back later for libtheora and cdparanoia.

   3.) Built the conversion shell script to convert formats:

#!/bin/bash

current_directory=$( pwd )

#remove spaces
for i in *.wma; do mv "$i" `echo $i | tr ' ' '_'`; done

#remove uppercase
for i in *.[Ww][Mm][Aa]; do mv "$i" `echo $i | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]'`; done

#Rip with Mplayer / encode with LAME
for i in *.wma ; do mplayer -vo null -vc dummy -af resample=44100 -ao pcm:waveheader $i && lame -m s audiodump.wav -o $i; done

#convert file names
for i in *.wma; do mv "$i" "`basename "$i" .wma`.mp3"; done

rm audiodump.wav

   Made above executable and copied to /usr/local/bin.

   4.) Made a subdirectory for the conversion, just in case it got messy and
splattered bits around. Moved all .wma into that subdirectory and ran
'wmamp3'. After several false starts because of missing packages, it woiked!

   Wow!

   Now for you multimedia gurus: is there any way to watch/listen to a live
feed of this stuff?

Rich

-- 
Richard B. Shepard, Ph.D.               |   Author of "Quantifying Environmental
Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc. (TM)   |  Impact Assessments Using Fuzzy Logic"
<http://www.appl-ecosys.com>     Voice: 503-667-4517         Fax: 503-667-8863