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New fad: MP3 search sites

Thu, 2008-09-11 07:30 — Jubal Harshaw

The latest fad going around is the host of MP3 search sites that are cropping up all over the place. Most of these are built off Google searches and can be hit-or-miss. But they're pretty useful for finding that rare track you always wanted, but couldn't find ...

WinAMP: MP3 not reporting length

Fri, 2008-06-06 20:24 — Jubal Harshaw

If you encounter issues with WinAMP not reporting the length of the song in the playlist, it is very likely that the mp3 is corrupt. However, in some cases, this could be due to a bug in WinAMP (I'm using v5.34) disliking unicode characters in the ID3 tags. In my case, an mp3 with the artist's name tagged as Dvořák - diacritics and all and especially the caronned (sic) r - was not gettings its song length displayed next to its title.

Removing the diacritic would have "fixed" the problem. But, I actually left it as it was.

Virtualdub : mp3 compression limited to 56 Kbps

Tue, 2006-07-25 17:49 — Jubal Harshaw

I am a big fan of VirtualDub. While my systems usually have the LAME encoder installed, this system (laptop, not mine) didn't. So, when I opened up the VirtualDub audio compression panel, I found that the maximum compression for the mp3 codec was limited to 56 Kbps. With the advent of VideoLAN etc., I've tried to keep separate codec installations to a minimum. So rather than installing a separate codec to get this sorted, I did some pottering about on google and came across a pretty straight forward solution, outlined as follows:

  1. Download and install Windows Media Player 10. (This problem can occur even if you already have Windows Media Player 10 installed.)
  2. Go to Start -> Run and type regedit and click OK.
  3. Using the panel on the left, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -> SOFTWARE -> Microsoft -> Windows NT -> CurrentVersion -> Drivers32.
  4. In the right hand panel, look for msacm.l3acm. Assuming that your windows installation resides on the C: drive, the current value should be something like C:\WINDOWS\system32\l3codeca.acm.
  5. Double click on msacm.l3acm and change C:\WINDOWS\system32\l3codeca.acm to C:\WINDOWS\system32\l3codecp.acm; i.e. change l3codeca to l3codecp and click OK. [For the curious, a = advanced, p = professional].
  6. Restart VirtualDub and you should find that the audio compression panel now has options to compress at rates upto 320 Kbps.

Hope this helps!

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