WMP10 Final comes with new 2004 FhG Pro ACM codec? Options

[SirGrey]

there's a roumor that the the codec developed by FhG is more siuted for bitrates lower than ~128, but this is AFAIK just a roumor. IIRC, no backups or data was presented in a recent discussion where Gabriel took part (a Lame developer) can't remeber the thread though

Lame has no ms-is stereo so Fhg encoders are preferable on low bitrates.
Also, Fhg encoders (some) lack (mostly) ringing, so are recommended to try for people with good hf hearing.
For more info on this search this forum for mid-side stereo and see Gabriel posts there.
About ringing see ff123 page, where he has an article about it...
May be this will help.

[lchshua]

But How can I turn WAV to this MP3??
It can only turn CD to MP3.

[westgroveg]

there's a roumor that the the codec developed by FhG is more siuted for bitrates lower than ~128, but this is AFAIK just a roumor. IIRC, no backups or data was presented in a recent discussion where Gabriel took part (a Lame developer) can't remeber the thread though

Lame has no ms-is stereo so Fhg encoders are preferable on low bitrates.
Also, Fhg encoders (some) lack (mostly) ringing, so are recommended to try for people with good hf hearing.
For more info on this search this forum for mid-side stereo and see Gabriel posts there.
About ringing see ff123 page, where he has an article about it...
May be this will help.

LAME has come a long way & current LAME 3.96 kick's the shit out of FhG Fastenc 1.02, MP3Enc 3.1, & what ever CEP 2.0 uses @ 128 kbps with about 10 problem samples I have tried to ABX. I have good HF hearing & I could hear ringing with older LAME encoders but LAME 3.96 really shines in this area compared to other mp3 encoders, FhG has a dull sound which is possibly why you can't hear ringing. To my ears LAME seems have a kind of flat sound which I believe I can hear but have not been able to ABX yet.

This post has been edited by westgroveg: Sep 9 2004, 09:52

[lithoc]

so, we got another radium fhg hack??

[beto]

Recently I posted in this thread that I had some problems upgrading WMP9 to WMP10. Basically the upgrade broke mp3 playback in the player.

The problem was that after upgrading to WMP10 the FhG codec was not listed in the installed audio codecs anymore. It's beyond my comprehension how it got uninstalled/corrupted...

I tried installing the wmp9 codecs but that didn't help, so I managed to get things working again with the following procedure, if anyone is interested:

1. Roll back to the previous WMP install, removing the player and the runtime environment. You have to restart twice, one for the player removal and one for the runtime removal;
2. Search for the l3codeca.acm file in the system32 directory and rename it to l3codeca.bak;
3. Open WMP and check for updates. This will install the mp3 codec again;
4. Close WMP and upgrade.

This worked for me.

Resources:
http://msmvps.com/chrisl/articles/10723.aspx
http://www.moviecodec.com/

EDIT: typo

This post has been edited by beto: Sep 9 2004, 13:59

[nyaochi]

I released ACMENC version 0.5. ACMENC 0.5 now works fine (including accurate calculation of song length) with FIIS professional, FIIS advanced, and LAME codecs. I fixed a lot of bugs and wrote a short document (README). Special thanks to witt and Nothern Verse (author of Sound Player Lilith). From ChangeLog:

CODE

- Bug-fix around progress report
- Failure check in opening an output file
- More error check codes
- Support of monoral and MPEG2/2.5-LayerIII files
- Calculation of Music CRC field
- Fix a bug around MP3 Info frame writing
- Output of TOC information in Xing MP3 header
- Patch for LAME ACM codec to output enough amount of frames
- Manual padding support for F-IIS (advanced) encoder
- Warning message when padding values becomes a negative value
- Support of high quality (non realtime) encoding mode
- New option -F (or --dest) to specify destination format in string
- Initial README and ChangeLog

Note: Do not use -h (high quality option) with FIIS professional codec. It may lower quality because of the codec's bug.

EDIT: I removed the link to ACMENC 0.5 because it is obsolute . The latest version (0.6) is available at:
http://nyaochi.sakura.ne.jp/xoops/modules/...php?cid=1&lid=1
And here's the users' guide:
http://nyaochi.sakura.ne.jp/xoops/modules/...wares/tc_3.html

This post has been edited by nyaochi: Jul 13 2005, 22:32

[Enig123]

A bit off topic...

Is it possible to make a tool which can use the new Xing mp3 encoder of the RealPlayer? This new encoder seems to gained some respect of the corrupted reputation of old Xing. Unfortunately it can ONLY use with RealPlayer and rip from CD even by person who payed for the unlimited version of RealPlayer.

I think a tool function liky Ayumi's acmenc for that encoder will be welcomed to most people.

This post has been edited by Enig123: Sep 11 2004, 01:57

[QuantumKnot]

A bit off topic...

Is it possible to make a tool which can use the new Xing mp3 encoder of the RealPlayer? This new encoder seems to gained some respect of the corrupted reputation of old Xing. Unfortunately it can ONLY use with RealPlayer and rip from CD even by person who payed for the unlimited version of RealPlayer.

The old Xing (1.5) wasn't as bad as most people thought and tied with FhG in the 128 kbps mp3 test, IIRC. It even beat every mp3 encoder on 'Waiting'.

Last time I played with RealPlayer, the mp3 encoder was limited to CBR while Xing had VBR. But maybe there is a switch to enable VBR?

[kurtnoise]

@nyaochi : good job

My question : could you add a "pipeencoding" option for your tool ??

Thanks.

[rjamorim]

there's a roumor that the the codec developed by FhG is more siuted for bitrates lower than ~128, but this is AFAIK just a roumor. IIRC, no backups or data was presented in a recent discussion where Gabriel took part (a Lame developer) can't remeber the thread though

Lame has no ms-is stereo so Fhg encoders are preferable on low bitrates.
Also, Fhg encoders (some) lack (mostly) ringing, so are recommended to try for people with good hf hearing.
For more info on this search this forum for mid-side stereo and see Gabriel posts there.
About ringing see ff123 page, where he has an article about it...
May be this will help.

It's also worth mentioning the FhG codecs are better tuned, and theoretically offer better quality than lame, at sampling rates other than 44.100Hz. That should come handy for DVD audio encoding (48kHz) and microphone recording (usually 22.050Hz)

[Pootle_1]

Is there any change in MP3 DEcode with the new codec?

I use 1by1 for MP3 playback and currently I prefer the quality of the MAD decoder (in_mad.dll) to the previous Fraunhofer ACM (l3codeca.acm).

This post has been edited by Pootle_1: Sep 15 2004, 13:21

[yourtallness]

@nyaochi: Nice tool. Front-end anyone?

Btw, the resulting mp3s are marked as joint stereo
but an analysis reveals only stereo frames...
In addition, a lowpass of 16KHz is used.
At least the speed is excellent.

[yong]

@nyaochi: Nice tool. Front-end anyone?

Curently i am using the Batchenc as the acmenc frontend.

[Liisachan]

  What about creating a small redistributable "installer" capable of extracting the required acm files/registry entries from the actual WMP10 installer?

maybe--just maybe, but "registry entries" are not needed here.
In my quick test with VirtualDub, I can use l3codecp.acm 3.3.2 Build 44 as an ACM codec without even installing WMP10 (tested on clean-installed Windows XP SP1, which has WMP 8 ) What I did was quite legal, inspired by that post by QuantumKnot:
(1) Extracted all the files from mp10setup.exe, using 7-zip.
(2) Copy l3codecp.acm in (1) to System32, as l3codeca.acm.

I just copied it, and then I can already use it from VirtualDub. That's slighly hackish so there might be bad side effects, tho.

So....seems just copying it will do, at least if you just want to use it as an acm codec, like when encoding movies. Altho, personally I don't use acm codecs when encoding movies.

I made some .bat files for my own testing purposes, so i could be lazy. Put l3c-inst.bat in the folder (1) and click it, then VD will use l3codecp;
Click l3c-undo.bat, then VD will again use l3codeca. If you have already installed WMP10, click l3c.bat in any place then l3codecp is used; l3c-undo.bat will undo it. They are basically just renaming files. You must restart VD each time. These .bat files dont work if the Device Manager is open.

[rjamorim]

(2) Copy l3codecp.acm in (1) to System32, as l3codeca.acm.

That will only work if you already had l3codeca.acm installed and referenced in the registry.

The right way of installing an ACM codec is using an appropriate .inf file.

[Wish]

WinXP, XP with SP1 integrated and XP with SP2 integrated all come with l3codeca.acm. It's how WMP6 and WMP 8(XP/XP+SP1) and WMP9(XP+SP2) decodes MP3s by using that Advanced codec.

[Liisachan]

(2) Copy l3codecp.acm in (1) to System32, as l3codeca.acm.

That will only work if you already had l3codeca.acm installed and referenced in the registry.

The right way of installing an ACM codec is using an appropriate .inf file.

True, that is what you'd do if you wanted to install lame acm or l3codeca.acm coming with divx 3.11 alpha.
But like i said, my test was on my clean-installed xp sp1. i.e. l3codeca.acm had been already registered there by default, coming with windows itself. The same is true with xp without sp1, and with Windows 2000 at least if you have installed wmp9. Probably even on win98.

iirc l3codeca.acm, aka IIS Codec, always comes with windows itself by default, as all movie encoders know. The problem is (or was) you cannot encode at > 56kbps with the default version of l3codeca.acm coming with windows itself (thats why they use lame acm or l3codeca 1.2 Build 63i if they want to use acm codecs anyway). 56kbps is crappy

in other words, I'm guessing you might use l3codecp.acm from WMP10 even on win2k/98 even tho (afaik) you cannot install wmp10 on 2k.

[yourtallness]

Any way to enable joint stereo and change the lowpass of 16 kHz?

[VLSI]

I hacked together the following as l3codecp.inf and was able to install the acm on my w2k box. Perhaps it'll be of use to others.

CODE

; Fraunhofer IIS MPEG Layer-3 Codec (professional)
; Windows 2000 installation file

[Version]
Signature="$CHICAGO$"

[Installable.Drivers]
l3acm=1:l3codecp.acm,"msacm.l3acm","Fraunhofer IIS MPEG Layer-3 Codec (professional)",,,

[DefaultInstall]
CopyFiles=CodecFile
AddReg=RegEntries

[CodecFile]
l3codecp.acm

[RegEntries]
HKLM,SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\drivers.desc,l3codecp.acm,,"Fraunhofer IIS MPEG Layer-3 Codec (professional)"
HKLM,SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\drivers32,msacm.l3acm,,l3codecp.acm

[DestinationDirs]
DefaultDestDir=11

[yourtallness]

Any way to enable joint stereo and change the lowpass of 16 kHz?

Anyone?
There must be a way!

This post has been edited by yourtallness: Sep 23 2004, 01:15

[yourtallness]

Tried it with the -h switch which supposedly yields higher
qualty. The result is simple stereo instead of joint stereo
(with only ss frames...). The 16 kHz lowpass is still there
though.

[k.eight.a]

Any way to enable joint stereo and change the lowpass of 16 kHz?

Anyone?
There must be a way!

Too bad since I've noticed the same "bug" in the older FhG encoders.
When this lowpass can't be changed it's useless for me...

[Busemann]

Any way to enable joint stereo?

FWIW high bit-rate joint stereo is generally not something you'd want on mp3 encoders other than LAME..

[sony666]

Any way to enable joint stereo and change the lowpass of 16 kHz?

Joint Stereo is active for bitrates <= 128
for 160+ it's off and I can't find a way to enable it either

the HQ mode doesn't seem to do anything except slowing down the encoding by a factor of ~8

the lowpass looks good, at 192k you can still see a cutoff line at 16KHz but lots of content up to 22KHz also. At 128k almost everything above 16K is cut off, as it should be...

This post has been edited by sony666: Jun 17 2005, 13:00

[sony666]

for those who didn't know yet

how to make the WMP10 professional codec work in other applications (like EAC) WITHOUT renaming system files

-after installing WMP10 make sure that l3codecp.acm is in the system32 folder. if you dont want to install WMP10 you can extract the file manually with "mp10setup.exe /T:c:\extract /C"

-make sure these registry keys are set, if not add them manually:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Drivers32]
"msacm.l3acm"="l3codecp.acm"
"msacm.l3codec"="l3codecp.acm"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\drivers.desc]
"l3codecp.acm"="Fraunhofer IIS MPEG Layer-3 Codec (professional)"


enjoy

This post has been edited by sony666: Jun 16 2005, 18:40