Non-default sound formats on Macs

[mmcirvin]

QuickTime, and by extension iTunes, ships with support for a lot of sound formats, but not all of them. Non-support for something or other got you down? Never fear; odds are you can play it on a Mac through the miracle of free software.

Yes, true believers, there's an Ogg Vorbis plug-in for QuickTime/iTunes. No guarantees, but it works fine for me.

XMMS seems to be an open-source WinAmp clone. I installed it as a Fink package. By default it supports some stuff that QuickTime doesn't. It's not my favorite, but if you're used to WinAmp you might like it.

Stephen Will Tanner has a bunch of song tracks he wrote in the .xm format. (#84 is the score to the last act of Brannock!) I haven't yet found plug-ins for anything that will play them directly, but I did find a Unix command-line utility called Timidity that can convert them to something playable. Works like a charm.

Now I'm going to bed.

(Update: Before I go to bed I should mention that the Timidity installer is, sadly, slightly brain-damaged: the application insists on trying to read a configuration file at the path /usr/share/timidity/timidity.cfg but the installer doesn't bother to create one, so you have to before it will run. All you have to do is create the directory and put an empty file there. This involves some messing with system permissions, but I'm loath to tell you how to do it because if you're not comfortable with the Unix command line you could mess things up badly... it might be better to wait for a more user-friendly method.)

Comments

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

Use VLC -- It plays pretty much everything. I have not yet found any audio or video format that it cannot handle.

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

OK, I take it back. VLC has played every single media file I've ever downloaded EXCEPT for *.xm files. Foiled!

:-(

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the pointer, anyway! .xm seems to be a real obscurity.

One longstanding complaint about Macs back in the Classic days was that, compared to Windows or (of course) Linux, there wasn't a lot of free software for them (either as in beer or as in speech); almost everything was distributed via the shareware model if it existed at all. There's nothing inherently wrong with shareware (in my opinion), but there was a definite cost differential if you really paid for licenses. But Mac OS X has led to a real explosion of free software ports that were too difficult to bother with before, either as X11 apps or as real Cocoa ports.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I'll forgive them for showing a Brendan Fraser movie in the screenshots.

GET A TRACKER

[pootrootbeer.livejournal.com]

Pfft, .xm is commonplace compared to the ULTRA SUPER MEGA RARE .670 music format.

[astrange.livejournal.com]

XMMS could play .xm last time I tried it. It's not normal audio, it's more like a MIDI file with instruments inside it.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

When I tried, it seemed to attempt it but made a godawful jet-engine noise. I know it can play some things like MIDIs and MODs.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Timidity actually has various little player GUIs it can use-- I've seen it running them on a Linux box. But this particular binary I got doesn't have them compiled in, so it basically only works as a converter from various MIDI/MOD-like formats to .WAV. I wonder if somebody's Finkifying it.

[astrange.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it only works if you use 8-bit sound output.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Thanks-- that did it!

Though it does make me wonder again about XMMS's user interface design. By default, it will attempt to play these files but do so as a series of deafening jet-engine farts; to fix this, all you have to do is click on the microscopic letter A, select "Preferences" from the pop-up menu, then in the "Audio I/O Plug-Ins" tab select "MikMod Player", then click on "Configure" to reveal a second two-tabbed display, then select "8 bit" under "Quality". It's so obvious!

Well, it works, anyway.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...But Timidity's batch conversion produces much better-sounding output. Well, at least XMMS provides a means of actually playing the files directly, which I can't currently do with Timidity.