I don't believe it, MS has included a 2004 compiled FhG Professional ACM codec with WMP10 final.

Thanks to MTRH for hosting this pic.



Update: WMP10 is out.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsme...asp?displang=en

Those neowin forums would provide quite a lot of flamebait to TOS#8 fans Some guys have wild ideas about audio compression quality.

sad but true, yes

Someone with an account please post links to Roberto's listening test before I start punching random objects in my room.

Why don't you just stay at HA & leave them alone.

We need to spread what is good
High Quality Audio Evangelists.

We don't need evangelists just people who bring a certain level of objectivity into those discussions.

I have no (at least not too much) interest in forcing/persuading people to use a specific format, but statements like 96kbps WMA == 192kbps MP3, which have been proven wrong multiple times, shouldn't happen on a technical board like neowin.

I visited a forum where people where saying mp3 sounded better than CDA, so what? it's no conspiracy, once you listen to mp3 you will be able to hear the difference if you can't your probably better off. In the end it's the jobs of the moderators to correct these problems why worry yourself?

Cause I was a newbie myself once and nobody bothered clearing up all those myths about sound quality.

Or that 128kbps MP3 -> 64kbps WMA sounds better than the MP3...that claim made me shiver

Well, back on the topic There's a WMP10 review here, in case someone's interested. I did not read it yet, so I dunno if it's a good review.

I suppose its too much to hope that WMP10 includes MP4/AAC support?

To be fair, that's a simple parroting of what Microsoft used to say about WMA. I haven't seen them say it lately, but that was the "official" line once upon a time.

The idea that you could transcode and gain quality magically seems to be new though.. Never seen that one.

Windows Xp only!

Seems like WMP 10 is for Windows XP only. Check out the system requirements.

This sucks, I have Windows 2000 at work and was looking forward to a simplified interface (and the FHG codec).

And recommended RAM is 512Mb, so I'm going to have some trepidation trying it on my 256 Mb Laptop at home too. Overall, the system requirements seem to point to a PC built in 2005!

Rajas

My low end, cheap as heck, Toshiba laptop which I got in 2003 has 512 meg ram. Half a gig has been pretty standard for at least 2 years. Standard now is 1 gig, realistically. Top end is 4 gig, or thereabouts.

@otto42
512 MB for a player? come on! ... this is NOT realisticall

Quote From M$

Video card with 256 MB of RAM or higher and DirectX 9.0b or later generation

Time to get that ATI X800 XT or GeForce 6800 Ultra I am dreaming of ... ^^

It's most likely possible to manually install the new ACM codec in Win2k.

Free hard disk space: 60 GB
This crap must be for downloadable HD content.

Didn't say it was. I was only commenting on what the average standard for PC's is.

it depends on many factors ... for example, in argentina, a dollar costs 3 pesos, so basically, all that is IT related, for us, is like paying 3 times ... like a HD costs 80 dollars, which is 240 pesos, so in reality, is like if it costs, to US people, 240 dollars ... so ... we are seeing many 256MB machines here ...

As for M$'s graphics card recommendation ... maybe they are implementing some 3D effects based on the Doom³ graphics engine ...

Oh.. you're all so funny!

yes, they are!
(another important post)

I'd like to see the doom3-style visualisations though, safes me from buying the actual game and to see that my graphiccard can't deal with it.

Has anyone tried this out yet? Was wondering if they fixed from WMP9:

1) Wrong playtime calculations on LAME encoded (VBR related?) MP3s
2) Couldn't FF/RW LAME MP3s
3) Inability to force it to use tag metadata for library features - it kept creating virtual tags via the Allmusic.com database which created problems like artist consistency (Beatles, The vs. The Beatles vs. Beatles, etc.)
4) Inconsistent / cumbersome behavior when trying to associate cover art with albums

Would like to know if these have been fixed before I even think about installing it on my machine.

Well I never had a problem seeking on LAME MP3s with WMP9, but as for the rest I am equally curious and will try it out in about an hour when I get home from work.

It also comes with the new WMA 9.1 codec !

Nope, still has my MP3s with bitrates generated completely at random

Too bad - do the FF/RW buttons work on LAME MP3s? What a shame that MS doesn't care enough to properly support MP3. I would be interested to know if you saw any of the other issues or if they have been corrected.

it did not even play any of my mp3s. says suitable codec not found:)

Same, I d/led from Wish's link, uninstalled my Raduim hack then installed WMP 10 & now no FhG mp3 codec is installed. Could be I didn't restart my PC yet?

K, I re-booted, still no ACM FhG mp3 codec. XPSP2, Windows Media Player 10.00.00.3646.

I have it.

C:\WINDOWS\system32\l3codecp.acm

Just installed WMP10 although, I couldn't say for sure it came from installing that. I didn't check previously.

1) OK.
2) OK.

WMP10 broke mp3 support in the player for me as well...

I'll investigate further when I have the time...

actually (and this is weird) WMP10 seems to display 2 different bitrates - the old (wrong) one, and a correct average bitrate on the bottom bar while the file is playing. Also going to file/properties while a VBR MP3 is playing displays (in the same window) both the correct bitrate AND the old wrong one. Yeesh!

Is FF = fast foward?
then..................this is my answer
Yes, Yes, it even works with mpg, avi etc etc

just download this add on and you can FF/RW anything that uses DirectShow to playback video/audio

http://ogo.nerim.net/reclockfilter/

http://download.microsoft.com/download/a/0...4/WM9Codecs.exe

MP3's seem to work fine for me. And after installing the 3ivx codec from 3ivx.com, WMP10 will now play M4A's with no trouble. Even will recognize them and allow you to put them in the music library, although it doesn't seem to understand the tags yet.

Just a heads up: The AAC decoder in 3ivx is trialware AFAIK, so after 30 days you'll beed to grav coreaac or some other filter or it'll stop working.

---

No problems with MP3s here.

I just wanted to see if that had been fixed or made possible yet. With WMP9, there was basically no way to get WMP to recognize or allow M4A's to go into the library. I'll remove 3ivx now that I know, as I don't use WMP anyway.

My system....
Athlon XP 1500+ (which run in 1.33GHz)
768MB DDR SDRAM
GeForce 3 Ti200 64MB
Maxtor 40GB HDD
CD-ROM/DVD-ROM plus external CD-RW drive
E-MU 1820m w/o sync card

The recommended by M$...
1.5GHz & above CPU What kind of processing power it needed???
512MB RAM Yeah!!!
256MB Display Card Is WMP10 with Doom3/HL2 engine built in?
60GB FREE HDD space I thought the download size is only 11,638KB? Will it expand 500 times after installing?
CD-ROM/DVD-ROM/CD-RW Drive Sheesh, luckily no DVD-RW drive needed.
24-bit Soundcard for HDCD Lucky me.
5.1 compatible Soundcard for MultiChannel Contents Bad Luck of me.

Oh, you are so funny!

256MB is enough for the player if you don't run those visualizations.

Don't fret, guys. Just tested it on a friends 700Mhz, 256MB PC and it runs like a dream as long as you dont run the new visualizations.

Per Wish,Sep 2 2004, 05:46 AM: "I don't believe it, MS has included a 2004 compiled FhG Professional ACM codec with WMP10 final....Thanks to MTRH for hosting this pic."

It's amazing that the above message remains posted. Has anyone actually verified the assertion? On XP-SP2, I downloaded WMP10. The FhG codec did NOT change from the 1.9 (Build 305) that had been previously installed.

I could verify that WMP10 installed on my WinXP-SP1 machine.


Windows Media Player seems to use this codec for ripping audio CDs from the fact that we can choose 128Kbps or higher for MP3 encoding. But if you want to use this codec from other programs such as CDex, you have to make a registory hack to activate this codec.

This codec encodes really fast (ca. 40x on my Pentium-IV machine). Quality of 128Kbps is OK for my portable use.

Search for that file l3codecp.acm, you'll find it in Windows\System32. I can't believe people would think I am making this up.

It doesn't register the l3codecp.acm as an ACM codec in the registry, thats why the ACM codec manager and other apps don't see it.

Yes. I already scanned the INF files bundled with the installer. It is registered as the preferred MP3 encoder for WMP, but not as a standard ACM codec.

Have you got this registry hack? Are other bitrates selectables? Is ABR/VBR implemented?

Edit: Nevermind, I managed to hack the registry myself and it looks like just CBR is implemented.

Norman

I can also confirm that the new mp3 codec encodes very fast, certainly for an FhG one anyways. It doesn't appear in ACM list though the ability to encode at 128 kbps is enough proof to me that it is "there"