front row and wma

generalmiaow

Hello, I am sort of a new mac user. I got a mac mini a few weeks ago and I love it, it's great. It's under the TV, where it's showing me films and playing music for me. I've been trying to have a "media centre" computer for a loooong time, and there's been everything from hacked xboxes and old laptops running linux under the TV for the last few months. This mac mini, the newest addition, is, however the only one of these solutions that my girlfriend and my flatmate feel comfortable using, because of the remote control, and the spinning front row thing, which even I think is awesome and I would usually play my mp3s from a bash prompt with mplayer, so that's something.

Here's the problem though. Roughly half of all my music is in wma format, from the far off times when I used windows to rip all my CDs. It would seem Front Row uses iTunes as a backend, which I am shocked to learn can only play mp3s and m4as, and not wmas, without (down)converting them to some other lossy format. I'm no audiophile, but I don't like the thought of transcoding all my wmas to something else, and before you suggest it, the thought of re-ripping all my CDs is enough to make me cry.

---tl;dr----

Basically, my question is, is there any way of listening to my WMAs, continuing to use the fabulous remote control and the lovely Front Row, without going through the messy transcoding procedure (and waste of disk space)?

generalmiaow

Hmm, I just noticed Center Stage, but I don't know if it support the remote control, it seems like it's in development or something... there's no way I should need a keyboard on this mac.

ZENER

Download and install Flip4Mac this adds a codec for windows media files which should I think make them play for you in a quicktime window. Don't know about FrontRow but at least you'll have some playback option.

ZEN

generalmiaow

Thanks ZENER. I actually got Flip4mac already, but unfortunately Front Row still doesn't see WMAs even where iTunes "processed" them. Oh well.

big_moe

when you import wmas to itunes it converts them to whatever you have the program set up to do. you can set that as a lossless file if needed. or up to 320kbps of mp3s.

moe

generalmiaow

cheers big_moe, I just had a look there at import options and it seems there's a variety of encoding options. I guess I can sacrifice a bit of space just to play all my music

ZENER

Try copying all your .wma files to your movies folder. With flip4mac installed quicktime, which plays wmv and wma files with flip4mac will become the player for them.

In FrontRow Quicktime plays all movie files in the movies folder and iTunes does all audio files in the music folder so I'm guessing any audio files in the movie folder will be handled by Quicktime.

Worth a shot eh ?

ZEN

Dont be at yourself

Front Row just plays your iTunes library though...