WMP9 and MP3 files (can't play them, but mediaplayer classic can)

I’ve been messing with Exact Audio Copy on a win-98 machine.

I’ve extracted a wav file from a CD, and had EAC compress it to an MP3 using (I think) the LAME compressor.

WMP9 can’t play the MP3 file, but Media Player Classic (MPC) can.

I then went and found something like “K-Lite mega codec pack” (17 mb file) and installed it.

After installing it, WMP9 still can’t play the mp3 file in question, but now MPC can’t play it either.

So What’s going on?

What does it take to have WMP (and now MPC) play a G-D mp3 file?

I don’t recommend codec packs, because they make it very hard to pinpoint problems.

Anyway, the first thought that came to mind when reading your post was ID3 tags. I remember long ago I used to have some mp3’s which real player could play, but not WMP. I think it was because of the ID3 or real player tags. (Those are just header information at the start of the file to tell you song name, artist, album, date, year, etc.) I’m sure if you google you’ll find utilities to edit or remove such tags. Not all media players can read all tags. Also ID3 has ID3 version 1 and ID3 version 2. Anyway, that’s just a hypothesis, and something to try.

You said you encoded it with LAME, so I’m fairly confident it’s an MP3, but just to be 100% certain, feed it into gspot. You could also try the render button on gspot and see where it hangs or halts.

gspot 2.70a output:

Container: MPEG Elementary Audio << { 1 aud }
Codec: MPEG-1 Layer 3
Info: 44100Hz 227 kb/s tot , Joint Stereo LAME3.97

Proposed Codec Solutions and tests

(SRC)->> — (A) — >[Ligos MPEG Audio Decoder]> — ( — >[DefaultSound Device]
Failed to create the source filter for the input file D.AddSourceFilter() failed. Error: 0x80004005: [unknown]
— — — — — -
(SRC)->> — (A) — >[Ligos MPEG Splitter]> — ( — >[ACM: ]> — (C) — >[Default DirectSound Device]
Failed to create the source filter for the input file D.AddSourceFilter() failed. Error: 0x80004005: [unknown]
(above 2 lines repeated twice more)
— — — — — -
(SRC)->> — (A) — >[Ligos MPEG Splitter]> — ( — >[ffdshow Audio
Decoder ]> — (C) — >[Default DirectSound Device]
Failed to create the source filter for the input file D.AddSourceFilter() failed. Error: 0x80004005: [unknown]
(SRC)->> — (A) — >[Ligos MPEG Splitter]> — ( — >[Voxware MetaSound Audio Decoder]> — (C) — >[Default DirectSound Device]
Failed to create the source filter for the input file D.AddSourceFilter() failed. Error: 0x80004005: [unknown]

I uninstalled the K-lite codec pack and MPC regained it’s ability to play the mp3 file in question - but WMP still couldn’t play the file.

I renamed ALL my l3codec?.acm files to .bak and MPC could _still_ play the file in question. (?)

I followed the instructions on this page:

http://www.msfn.org/board/MP3WMP9-t38261.html

Basically, I needed l3codecp.acm and the associated win-98 inf file crafted from the above page.

I apparently had the “pirated” version of l3codecp.acm and either it wasn’t installed properly or it just plain doesn’t work.

WMP9 ->CAN<- now play the file in question.

Thought this might be helpful for people arriving at this thread via a Google search (as I did):

I repaired a file suffering similar symptoms by opening it in a hex-editor and trimming all bytes in the header that come before the first 0xFFF “sync word”.

The header format is documented at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_stream

Willem.

install wmp11 runtime should work