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Non-default sound formats on Macs
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
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.)
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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.
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