WMA playback - congrats to all concerned!

[baobab68]

Congrats to the developers of the new WMA codec.

Although it's early days yet, the Rockbox developer community, and the particular developers concerned, are to be applauded. I think support in ROCKbox for one of the world's most used codecs (like it or not!) is important.

Thanks again guys, from a total non-coder who nonetheless appreciates this step forward.

[LambdaCalculus]

The Rockbox team has done it again! Once the codec gets cleaned up a bit more, that means...


GOODBYE, STOCK FIRMWARE!  

[AlexP]

Yep, whilst none of my music is in wma and I would never use it, I unfortunately get sent reports from work I have to listen to, naturally in wma.  Shortly no longer having to switch to the OF will be very pleasent indeed!

[LambdaCalculus]

I don't use WMA either, but my iriver-toting friends have some music in WMA format that they want to listen to.

I already warned them about the awful performance of the codec on Coldfire targets, but they're patient guys and will wait for the codec to get cleaned up enough for performance to be acceptable.

Speaking of the subject, has anyone run new bench tests on the Coldfire targets with WMA files? I haven't heard anything new yet (and I've been away for a bit.)

[ColdSphinx]

I prefer other formats than wma but I testet with a
199 kBit/s Windows Media Audio 9.2 VBR Quality 98, 44 kHz, stereo 1-pass VBR
and get about 108% realtime on a iaudio x5 with 13804 but still some very little lags while playing.

[Llorean]

Yes, 108% realtime would mean that you have approximately 7.4% overhead in which to handle buffering, WPS drawing, etc, while playing music. How much overhead you need is going to vary a lot from target to target though.

[baobab68]

Just out of interest, does lower bitrate encoding create more work for the processor (has to do more transforms etc to create the waveform in the buffer) or less work?

[Davide-NYC]

Getting the WMA codec running on all SWCODEC targets in real time will CRUSH the last remaining objection to rockbox (other than the "I'm too lazy to read the manual" objection)

Thanks to all those involved in getting WMA working. Rock on RockBox!!!!

 

[baobab68]

I tried a small sample WMA, totally DRM-free, compressed at 32kbps, WMAv8, in hopes of hearing it play back on my H320. It just seems to crash the player. Perhaps I'm not waiting long enough for it to get started?

Although I seem to remember reading somewhere that there's a minimum bitrate that's supported...

[LambdaCalculus]

I've tried a small set of WMAs on my iPod; 160kbps, no VBR, and of course bereft of DRM. The files played properly, but menu navigation was S-L-O-W while they were playing.

Davide-NYC: We are close on this one! Now that WMA support has been added, I've just had a bunch of co-workers asking about it! I think that was the one thing that was holding some people back.

[edit] I forgot to mention that the WMAs I used were created using WMPv10.

[baobab68]

Lambda - if yours are playing, what's the CPU boost like while that's happening - sounds like the CPU's being kept pretty busy!!

[saratoga]

I tried a small sample WMA, totally DRM-free, compressed at 32kbps, WMAv8, in hopes of hearing it play back on my H320. It just seems to crash the player. Perhaps I'm not waiting long enough for it to get started?

Although I seem to remember reading somewhere that there's a minimum bitrate that's supported...

I don't have any WMPv8 encoded files to test with, so its possible that file falls into the same catagory as <32k files do on the newer encoders.  If you like, you could email me the file to my gmail account (mgiacomelli).  

[Chronon]

I played a 64kbps sample track from my XP installation (a snippet of Beethoven).  It seemed to play fine on my Gigabeat, but I didn't really navigate or do any other activities while it was playing.

Good work!  

[baobab68]

Saratoga - I'm sending the file now.

bao

[saratoga]

Saratoga - I'm sending the file now.

bao

Thanks, looks interesting.