Long story short, I learned there is an XMMS release of a plugin I use in Winamp for music playback (mp3PRO). Sadly, I recoded most of my music to mp3PRO back in the day, and now I’m stuck using Winamp, even on Linux. I like the player, wouldn’t change it, but I wanted to switch to something native, like Audacious or Qmms. But, this codec is abandonware and it only has a plugin released for XMMS back in 2005 (closed source, of course).
Is there any way I can make this plugin work in any modern player? It’s 32-bit only, but that’s not a problem, I can just use the 32-bit versions of Audacious or Qmms (Void still has 32-bit builds of them in repo)… maybe like a wrapper or something… I would debug and do whatever it needs, I just need some pointers where to start looking and what to do exactly if I’m gonna have a shot at making this work.
I tried loading the plugin in Audacious, it throws and error while loading, something xmms_config related (can’t remember, I’m currently not at the PC I was testing this on), Qmms just says that it can’t load the plugin. I presume GTK+ would be required and I’d bundle whatever libraries it needs with the plugin, just don’t know where to start really… ldd would be a good start I guess, but I didn’t run that 😂.
At some point you’ll have to use a new codec, even if it’s in 10 years. So it might be a good idea to download the music instead of converting.
Soulseek with Nicotine+ seems to be a good way to download music. Or streamrip/deemix with a (temporary) Deezer/Tidal subscription supports high quality audio.
I was afraid that this might be the only viable solution… I would do it, but it will take A LOT of time.
More time than trying to shoehorn a defunct package for an abandoned codec in to a random player which even if it works would only be a temporary kludge not a fix?
Well, the challenge is interesting though… but yes, you are correct.