Thanks to this forum and this thread, I was able to get my ALAC files to play in Windows MCE and my xbox360. Thanks again!

I probably spent a few time in the last few months looking for a way to play ALAC in WMP11 and this did the trick. I did try and see if that mp3source.ax would register with Vista, and, unfortunately not.

That's a common issue with Vista. Rightclick the "register.bat" and choose "Run As" and execute it as an Administrator.

Hi,

I'm trying to follow this thread to work out how to play aac via the xbox extender, but it seems like there's a few things being discussed and I can't quite follow. What exactly do I need to install to get this working?

Previously I managed to use ffdshow and WMPTS to get m4a files tagged and playing in WMP 11 on vista and locally in MCE, however they weren't tagged when viewed through the extender, and I wasn't able to play them (error playing media message).

I'd really like to get this working, any help would be much appriecated.

Thanks,

Mike

Thought I had it working... but no

I've been trying the MP3Source.ax with WMPTS, but it just won't work on the 360. Please could someone who has this working point me in the right direction?

But what about the other way? How to create ALAC files from WAV without iTunes on Windows? I cannot find an ALAC encoder on Rarewares...

Is iTunes or Mac solutions the only way? I use FLAC for everything now, so just wondering what ALAC encoding options are.

Well, there's iTunes and, err, iTunes Producer (the professional app for music publishers to upload to iTMS).

I use iTunes on Windows quite happily but if you must use something else then look in the following...

iTunesEncode.exe this is a command line utility that can be used with EAC (Exact Audio Copy) and Foobar.

There is also now a module for dbpoweramp to encode ALAC (and of course a module to decode them). See http://forum.dbpoweramp.com/showthread.php?p=50839#post50839

As the original author of this thread, I'm delighted to have searched through google and come back to a large amount of progress.

I'd given up ever trying to find a way around this out last year, but now I've just bought an Xbox 360, I'm really keen to get this sorted asap

John - thanks very much for your tireless effort in finding a solution, and DCoder - great work.

Now I've just got to see if I can get it all to work.

Best wishes

Steve

While I do have Apple Lossless working in Media Center 2005 (and WMP10), I don't have an Xbox360 myself to test as an Extender. According to Microsoft since the solution is a proper directshow filter and it is working in Media Center, it should work with an Xbox360 acting as a Media Extender. Indeed there was at least one such report to this thread that someone has managed this so it should work for you as well.

I use Roku M2000 SoundBridges as my [music] Extenders.

Sorry, can I get some noob instructions on getting this to work? I've got 3.01 of ffdshow installed, registered the bass modules and still no go with playing alac files. Noticed that latest ffdshow is supposed to have alac support, but no go.

Did I miss something somewhere?

If your intention is to get Apple Lossless (aka. ALAC) working in Windows Media Player then while ffdshow is supposed to have ALAC support in reality the current build is missing it. However you don't need ffdshow to get ALAC working. All you need is the BASS based module that I helped create (although I didn't write it). You can download it here http://www.dsp-worx.de/ look at the January 8th 2007 entry for the details.

In addition you will want to install WMPTSE to let Windows Media Player read the meta-tags from MPEG4 music files.

Thank you for doing all that work! Couple of informational notes for anybody else that runs into the same issue thinking that they couldn't get it to install like I was.

#1. I couldn't get it to play through WMP if the the ax file was registered from a directory with spaces in it. Thought that was weird, or maybe I'm just too noob to know any better. But repeatedly registering it from a \program files\ nested dir, playback from within wmp would not work. When registered from \windows\system32 or it's own dir off drive root, or any other dir without spaces it works. Not tested on multiple computers, just my main music server.

#2. The second part of my problem was that alacs encoded using MAX on OS X won't play. Bringing the MAX alac files into itunes and then reconverting them to apple lossless does the trick. MAX must be doing something just a little bit different. But since about half of my files were imported using MAX I didn't catch this one right away.

John,

thanks for all the tips I finally got my ALAC files in Itunes, WMP 11 and WMC working together in Vista 32.
I just have some trouble with the artwork.

Right now I have all my artwork from Itunes embedded in the each file and I'm trying to get WMP11 and WMC to read that artwork, I guess WMP11 does not read that info from the files tags automatically.

Do you have a work around that problem?

Thanks

Neither of the two current plugins for WMP will let WMP read embedded artwork in Apple Lossless (ALAC) or AAC files (both use the same m4a file format and tag format).

While iTunes can also handle external artwork, the way it does this will have no chance of working with WMP.

This leaves two options:

1. Do what I do, which is to manually copy the iTunes artwork to WMP (more complicated than it sounds).
or
2. Try the "MusicBridge" utility available here http://jrmwillis.googlepages.com/ I have not tried this utility for a long time but on paper it sounds perfect for you.


For the benefit of yourself and others I will now detail the manual steps I use to transfer artwork from iTunes.

[NOTE: Yes, this method is complex, but if you are only adding a CD or two at a time it is not torturous. It is also more importantly 100% reliable for me. I have dozens of albums shared between iTunes, WMP10 and Media Center 2005. All with the same high quality artwork and every single track plays and displays perfectly in all three programs. When I started this process, MusicBridge was not advanced enough so I had to do it manually anyway. If I was starting again now I would try it first.]

WMP typically keeps its artwork in four jpg files (it can read embedded artwork in MP3 files, but overall WMP prefers using these jpg files). The four jpg files are stored in the folder of the album, and have names like the following

AlbumArt_{903B2B7B-21D7-4BA2-B72C-5535C4A0A3B1}_Large.jpg
AlbumArt_{903B2B7B-21D7-4BA2-B72C-5535C4A0A3B1}_Small.jpg
AlbumArtSmall.jpg
folder.jpg

These files are created by WMP when either you RIP a CD in WMP (which you will not be doing as you will do this using iTunes), or when you use the "Find Album Info" command in WMP. The long number in the first two file names is a unique reference number WMP uses to associate the files in its internal database with the tracks. While WMP will happily look for just a folder.jpg Media Center seems to need to look up via the unique serial number in the WMP database (this is why I believe it is necessary to ensure you have generated these files so as to register them in the database first).

It used to be possible to use some scripts to 'search' the iTunes Store for the artwork you wanted and display the results in a webbrowser since the iTunes Store is basically a glorified website. However some time ago Apple put in extra steps that broke all these scripts. Before it was broken, I used to search the iTunes Store for the artwork, it would display in Internet Explorer, and I would then save it as a jpg. Now the only way to get artwork from the iTunes Store is using iTunes itself.

As I mentioned, iTunes can also use external files for artwork, but these are encapsulated in a proprietary file format with the file extension .itc and stored in a different set of folders to the actual music tracks. It is possible to extract the jpg from within these files. It is also possible in iTunes itself to copy&paste the artwork to force it to be embedded instead. If you buy a track from the iTunes Store it will use a .itc file for the artwork which you get with the track you purchased, and if you use the "Get Album Artwork" command in iTunes (for your own CD ripped tracks) it will download the artwork and save it as an .itc file. These files as I said are stored in separate folders and like WMP also have long serial numbers as the names. Simply looking at the files you would not be able to tell which belongs to which album/track. Therefore either you do this one album at a time (so you only need to find the most recently modified .itc file) or you will have to extract/convert each one until you find the right one.

This site details the .itc file format or at least as much as has been deduced so far.
http://www.waldoland.com/dev/Articles/ITCFileFormat.aspx

As I said the .itc files while proprietary to Apple do contain standard jpg files (in theory you may also come across png files as well, but all the ones I have used have been jpg). As the jpg file format is well known with known start and end markers, it is possible to search for these markers in a .itc file and extract that portion. Several utilities for Mac OS X have been written to do this, however most of them have been written instead on the assumption that the jpg will start a specific length in to the .itc file. This appears to have changed with the latest iTunes so these utilities are not working properly. However GraphicConvertor for Mac OS X does work the other way, that is it looks for the jpg start and end markers and will successfully extract the jpg.

For Windows, I use a command line utility called bitmaprip which also looks for the start and end markers for jpgs and copies them out to a separate file. You can download this here http://mark0.net/soft-bitmaprip-e.html

If you have only got your artwork already embedded inside iTunes Apple Lossless tracks and don't have a .itc file you can still extract the artwork either by finding a utility to do this (most are for Mac OS X), or simply by copying the artwork to the clipboard and pasting it in to a graphics utility in Windows and saving it as a jpg file. However try looking at this utility http://blog.timc.idv.tw/posts/itunes-artwork-extractor/

So by now we should have the iTunes artwork in a standard jpg format.

In theory, just putting the jpg as a file in the album folder with the name "folder.jpg" is enough and WMP will then automatically use it. However I don't feel this is reliable enough, and certainly my experience was that it might work in WMP but did not in Media Center 2005. So I do the following

i. In WMP, make sure the album is in the library
ii. In WMP use the "Find Album Info" command to search the Microsoft database for that album, and pick the best match, it will then create the four jpg files for that album I mentioned earlier. The two small files it creates are really small, the two 'large' ones are only a pitiful 200x200 pixels (a mere ninth the resolution of iTunes Store artwork). As we are going to replace the two larger files, if there is not an exact match in the Microsoft database it will not matter too much.
iii. Now replace the folder.jpg and the AlbumArt_{903B2B7B-21D7-4BA2-B72C-5535C4A0A3B1}_Large.jpg files with the iTunes copy. As you are going to use the magic serial number in the file name generated for that album by WMP it will show up properly in both WMP and Media Center but using the much better quality image taken from iTunes.

Issues to consider.

1. I don't know if MusicBridge keeps the artwork at the full iTunes size when it copies it to WMP. I also don't know if it does all four jpg files or just the folder.jpg file. If it just does the folder.jpg file then you may find it does not display properly in Media Center. However it will cost nothing to try MusicBridge.
2. WMP11 is known to trash your carefully created artwork jpg files and re-replace them with its crummy 200x200 versions. WMP10 does not have this fault. You could try locking (making read only) the files after you have created them.
3. Internet Explorer 7 apparently patches the jpg library in Windows and this can result in perfectly legitimate jpg files showing as black squares in WMP. As Microsoft never seem to fix bugs (they merely call it a feature) I have chosen not to upgrade to IE7 and WMP11 to avoid these problems. Unfortunately if you have been foolish enough to upgrade to Vista you do not get a choice.


... And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Windows Vista, and WMP11 followed with him. And power was given unto them over 95% of computers, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of Redmond ...

I second that, thanks a lot to the great people here for all your efforts! At last I can use ALAC both on my iPod and my Vista Media Center PC.

However, it seems to be a small issue left to solve. I can't play the audio files using my Xbox 360 elite as a Media Center Extender. It will immidiately hang when trying to play the ALAC file. Other (supported) media formats works just fine. I thought the Media Center Extender just got a decoded and uncompressed stream from the PC, but apparently it doesn't. Any hints would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

--
/Tuono

I don't have an XBox 360 so I have not tried this. There was an earlier report from someone who said it worked for him but that was before the Elite model shipped and more importantly before the Spring update to the XBox 360 software. It is knowing Microsoft quite possible that one of their updates broke this. I do know that they did remove the paragraph from the webpage on their site that said this should work (i.e. any audio format).

All,

I have the same problem. Thanks to John's efforts I can play ALAC using WMP on Vista Ultimate, but I cannot get ALAC to play via an XBOX 360 Elite.

My holy grail is to get a single lossless compression format working that can be used by:

• iTunes/iPod where iTunes is the "master source" and is used to rip CDs and will correctly display artwork
• Windows Media Player via XBOX 360 media extender
• SONOS

If anyone discovers how to get the XBOX bit working then, I'd really like to hear from you!

Andy

It is certainly possible to do the first and third entries in your list, but it looks like as I said that Microsoft have broken the ability to do the second one. ShinKen's reply to this thread implies it did work for him (at that time), and the following from Microsoft's website implies it also used to work but no longer does.

The Microsoft website had a page saying -

Audio formats
• Windows Media Audio (WMA) Standard
• WMA Pro
• WMA Lossless
• MP3
• Other formats for which a DirectShow decoder is installed and registered on the PC

The same page now says just

Audio formats
• Windows Media Audio (WMA) Standard
• WMA Pro
• WMA Lossless
• MP3

See this link for an archived copy of the first version
http://web.archive.org/web/20070118163428/...der/mcefaq.mspx

and this for the current version
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/mediace...der/mcefaq.mspx

So I am afraid it looks like it is all Microsoft's fault. If this is true as appears to be the case then the only option for the Xbox 360 to play the music is not do it via the Extender method but instead the streaming method from a uPnP server e.g. TVersity which does work (such servers will automatically transcode the format on the fly). This does work with the current Xbox 360 software.

Note: The Sonos ZonePlayers, Roku SoundBridges, and SlimDevices SqueezeBox all support ALAC.

Extenders can stream uncompressed PCM audio. So, if the host Media Center system can play/decode the song (via filter), the Extender UI can still play it via streamed PCM... I don't think this function was removed. Maybe Microsoft just doesn't want to encourage it's use, since other formats don't have direct library/metadata support.

i'm still confused, im hoping you guys can help me. i read this whole thread, and downloaded this: http://files.dsp-worx.de/dsmp3source_aac_alac.zip and registered it. but my ALAC files still won't play in WMP. i've tried WMP10 and 11

i have xp sp2
any help?

thanks in advance

It is likely another directshow filter currently has priority over the ALAC one. To test this make sure you have two test files, one as an AAC (unprotected AAC) file, and one as an ALAC (Apple Lossless one), if you have it, check them first in iTunes (or even better create them in iTunes).

If WMP is able to play the AAC file but not the ALAC one (remember both will have the .m4a file extension), then this would suggest another different directshow filter is currently controlling playback of all .m4a files and this other filter cannot play ALAC ones. If this is the case then you either need to remove this other one, or alter the priority numbers so that the ALAC one is the top priority. There is a utility called DSFMgr (DirectShow Filter Manager) which lets you do this.

There are lots of AAC capable directshow filters but only the one above will do ALAC as well.

thanks for the quick reply, still a little confused though. I'm not quite sure which filters i need to raise or lower the priorities on. here's a screenshot of all my filters if you don't mind checking it out for me:

http://img368.imageshack.us/img368/3175/filtersxy1.jpg

i've got a feeling it has to do with those few "mpeg4 decoder DMO" filters, but it won't let me change their priorities.

thanks again for helping me out here

After comparing your list with mine, I believe the entry you need to move to top priority is "File Source (MP3)".

Yes the name is a bit misleading, but the history of the software explains why.

There is a programming library for writing audio software called BASS, another developer took an MP3 module written using BASS and repackaged it for use as a directshow filter in Windows Media Player. I when trying to find an ALAC solution, noticed this and that there was also an existing ALAC module for BASS, I then persuaded the author of the repackaged MP3 module to do the same for ALAC, hence the filter name still reflects the original MP3 version.

By the way, the file path of the filter would have helped you track down which one, the path points to the location you saved the filter.

To move it to top priority (file merit) double click on it and adjust the slider and then click the button.

Did you try an AAC track as opposed to an ALAC track? Did it work? If it did not then the priority may not be the problem.

i tried an AAC track and it did indeed play through WMP. I fixed the priority on "file source (mp3)" and still nothing with ALAC.

if i remember correctly, i did get ALAC to play through WMP the first time i downloaded the dsmp3source a while ago. and then a week or two later it just stopped again. maybe because i downloaded conflicting software or something?

Possibly. If the other AAC filter also is set to the maximum priority then it may still be being chosen. If you download and run Graphedit and tell it to render an AAC track, it might indicate which directshow filter is being chosen to play it. You could then use DSFMgr to decrease the priority of it or remove it all together. Properties in WMP might also say what is being used to play an AAC track.

If AAC is working (still) then it definitely looks like another filter is getting in before the ALAC one. Also go back and make sure DSFMgr did successfully save the priority change.

From your list, it is possible Nero and others have installed AAC capable filters. If you installed the Orban AAC plugin then uninstall it.

ok so wmp wouldn't give me any info in the properties, and graphedit gave me "default sound device" or something like that. I lowered the priorities of a few things, and deleted some unnecessary stuff. Still doesn't play ALAC but i get this now: "The source filter for this file could not be loaded."
I tested AAC and i get the same message, did i screw stuff up even more?

i think i deleted my 3ivx filters, was that a bad move?

the file source (mp3) filter is at full priority, why would it say it can't load it?

i also just re-registered the "file source (MP3)" filter and brought its priority all the way up. now WMP is giving me this for both ALAC and AAC:

"Windows Media Player encountered an unknown error. This can occur when another program or operating system component encounters a problem but does not communicate the nature of the problem to the Player."

Getting a lot of different Directshow filters all working at the same time is hard work (as you are finding). I myself had huge problems getting MKV working and ended up having to use a System Restore to revert to an earlier stage.

If your feeling adventurous you could ensure you have a system restore point, remove all or as many as possible directshow filters (e.g. Nero, PowerDVD, etc.) and unregister and reinstall the ALAC one as well. Basically try and get just the ALAC one working by itself first, and then add the others back one at a time.

Also, have you installed one of the two MPEG4 meta tag plugins for WMP, that is WMPTSE or the SoftPointer one? If so try turning it off and/or uninstalling and using the alternate one. I currently use the SoftPointer one myself.

I ended up here after an internet search to find a way to play Apple Lossless and all the vareties of AAC in my Windows Media Player. I saw the Directshow filter suggested by John Lockwook.

I downloaded the filter in zip format and extracted the files. It contains (3).dll files, (1) MP3Source.ax file and (2) .bat files; register and unregister.

I opened Register.bat in Notepad. It seemed to envoke regsvr32 to install the MP3Soucre.ax. So I ran WXP from Start\Run\Folder Location\Name\register.bat.

I am in uncharted waters now. I want to proceed with caution. I got a blank command prompt window and a success message. But I'm confused.

What do I do with the (3) .dll files include in the filter download file?

Was I suppose to or did I register the MP3Source.ax file properly?

What is the proper procedure for installing this Directshow filter?

thank you reader if you have come this far. Any help for the unknowing would be very much appreciated.

ptmx2

Texas, USA

i ended up deleting every single filter and then reinstalling the "file source(mp3) filter. WMP plays AAC again, but still no ALAC. i switched the tag plugin to the softpointer as well.
i must be doin something wrong

Have you verified iTunes recognises the track as an ALAC (Apple Lossless) track and iTunes itself plays it? Try creating a new fresh ALAC track in iTunes by ripping a CD. If the ALAC track was created by something else it might be slightly none standard and this directshow filter was only tested with genuine iTunes tracks.

to tell you the truth, I don't even have itunes. I don't remember exactly when i deleted it, maybe thats when WMP stopped playing ALAC. The ALAC files i have been testing were either ripped straight from a CD to ALAC or converted from FLAC, both using dBpoweramp music converter.
I'll try reinstalling Itunes and make some new ALACs with it, that sounds the best way to go.

thanks again for all your help John, i'll let you know how it goes

You will not need iTunes to play ALAC in WMP, but it will help you verify you have good ALAC files to test with. Even if iTunes plays it I would still create a new one in iTunes to be certain.

BINGO! I ripped a CD to ALAC with itunes and WMP played it no problem. I also discovered i can convert my FLACs to WMPLossless with dBpoweramp and then to ALAC with itunes, quite an annoying process however.
i'd pay money for a filter that allows WMP to play dBpoweramp's ALACs, but i guess there's nothing out there yet.

thanks again

In theory all ALAC files should be equal and all should play. It is clear that dBpoweramp is not creating 100% kosher ALAC files.

Depending on the source of your files, it may be as simple to re-rip all your CDs directly to ALAC using iTunes, this would be a single step and also allow iTunes to apply its own meta-information. You could also search for other tools to convert directly from FLAC to ALAC. I know on the Mac this would be possible for example using "Max" see http://sbooth.org/Max/ or "X Lossless Decoder" see http://tmkk.hp.infoseek.co.jp/xld/index_e.html

If you use anything other than iTunes obviously you need to test the results.

In my own case I used iTunes in Windows to rip all my CDs.