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Based on the now defunct and far older B4S Playlist Loader (there was a much improved 0.8.3 version released which was never fully documented on that page). This advanced version of the plugin now expands on the B4S playlist handling it originally came with and now adds in ASX based format (ASX, WAX, WVX and WMX) and WPL playlist handling.
The level of integration with Winamp has now been greatly surpassed with direct integration into the open/add file dialogs, open/add url dialogs and also it supports full file association with Winamp, nice!! As well there's basic support in place for loading of playlists into the 'Playlist' section of the 5.x Media Library (via the 'Import Playlist from File' right click menu option).
Winamp is capable of playing 99% of all known mms:// WMP streams without the plugin installed. With the plugin installed you get direct support (as long as you've associated the relevant files to Winamp) of about 95% of all Windows Media streaming audio files/links (not bad at all really).
The plugin will do its best to allow Winamp to correctly play the ASX based playlists. For the rest you will need to manually alter the added Winamp playlist entries such as by removing the added /.wma or changing /.wma to ?=.wma. If you come across a WMA based link that doesn't work correctly then please contact me so i can see what can be done to improve the plugin's handling of such files. Without test files i can't improve/fix things, it's really as simple as that!
Update:
As of Winamp v5.12, there is now a new in_wm plugin which removes a lot of the issues that have been previously the case with Winamp's WMA format support. If using this new version of Winamp, v0.9.9.8f and upwards will adjust it's handling accordingly of mms:// and other default extensions which should let in_wm process things without any conflicts.
As well i've received a number of 'issues' with this plugin which in just about all cases has turned out to be down to not having the correct WMA codecs installed. Installing Winamp v5.12 should sort this out for you as well if you allow it to download the newer WMA redistribution package (which was pulled out of the installer since the WMA 9.1 codecs are upto 6Mb in size compared to the 1Mb for WMA 6/7 codecs).
How to use the added playlist formats
Simply, you just use Winamp as you would normally for m3u and pls playlists. You can even go to the Winamp Preferences -> File Types and select the playlist format(s) you want associated to Winamp which is useful for WMA streams on the internet that you'd rather have play in Winamp instead of Windows Media Player, etc.
Download v0.9.9.8f
Download v0.9.9.8f
Potential Features to Come:
- Support for other playlist formats (mpcpl, fpl, m3u8)
Custom defined processing list for asx based playlist
(ie determines how certain troublesome asf streams, etc are handled by default)
[ With Winamp v5.12 this isn't really needed now so is unlikely to be implemented unless i can full warrant it.. ]- Configuration over which of the supported playlist formats will be active
[ Partly implemented with all ASX based formats removed if in_wm is not present ]
- General fixes and improvements in the loading of playlists under the 'Playlist' entry in the 5.x Media Library
- Anything else i or people suggest that is suited for the plugin
ASX Specific Processing
Added into the 0.9.9.x series of the plugin is now a configuration page in the Winamp Preferences (File Types -> Extra Options) to allow some control over which file types will have extra processing done ie the addition of /.wma to the end (since there were reports of people finding mp3 entries in asx files being incorrectly handled so this option will now fix this).
With Winamp v5.12 this preferences option is now fairly defunct but is left for legacy support for those who may need it (or want to stick with the old/unsupported versions of Winamp).
Known issues
Well issues isn't really the best word but it keeps things simple.
- Some/all of the added playlist formats will not be listed when 'All supported types' is shown in the Open/Add File(s) dialog (more info about this)
- As best as the plugin works, some of the extracted ASX file/stream references may need to be manually altered so that the correct plugin in Winamp will play them (this is a bit hit and miss and in most cases the plugin should guess things correctly but there's always the odd exception)
- Stream links may not load correctly from Firefox, etc (Firefox Association Issues)
The reason for this is due to a limitation with Windows where the searchable extensions can only be upto 260 characters long. So when this limit is reached then any extensions over this will not be scanned for when the 'All supported types' choice is selected.
You can see if your total extension list goes over this limit by holding down 'F7' when you go to the Open/Add File(s) dialog with it creating a file ofd_listing.txt. This will list all of the text used to make up the extension list drop down including the file extensions to scan for when each part is chosen. From looking at this you should be able to see if the 'All supported types' extension list is over 260 characters long and so be able to work out which file extensions are not going to be shown.
It's a pain but is a side effect of Winamp being able to support so many different file formats (a good thing) and the filesystem limitations of the OS (with not much that can be really done about it)
So in summary, if any of the extensions provided by the plugin don't show up under the 'All supported types' entry then you just need to select the 'Playlist Files' option and they all will then appear.
Taken from a conversation with DJ Egg (Winamp forum moderator and all round Tech Support god), here's a quick 'how to' on setting up Firefox to correctly work with the plugin's ability to handle stream links sent to Winamp.
- Firefox > Tools > Options > Downloads
- Plug-ins button
- Uncheck the WMP ASX plugin
If you've set Winamp as the default program for the ASX (and/or other formats provided by the plugin) then that is all you need to do. If not you will then need to manually associate Winamp to be used by the browser as follows...
- In the Downloads tab, under File Types, hi-lite ASX
- Click "Change Action"
- Checkmark "Open them in this application"
- Browse to winamp.exe
- voila, it's done
For browsers other than Internet Explorer and Firefox (such as Netscape or Mozilla) then you will need to do a similar thing to ensure that Winamp is correctly associated with the required filetypes. The reason for this is that non IE browsers handle the processing of the filetypes internally instead of from the general system settings.
example: http://127.0.0.1:80/
These are a strange one since there are cases where a shoutcast stream is stored in a asx file but a url in the same format can also be a valid WMA stream. So by default as we're dealing with WMA content, /.wma will be appended to the end of such streams even if they are in fact a different format and need to be processed by a different input plugin.
I have looked at a fix for this but in the tests the prevention of the adding of the /.wma to the end of the stream url could not be done correctly for all streams since there is no extra information provided in the playlist to determine what type of stream it was.
So the general effect of this is that if the stream doesn't play in Winamp with the /.wma on the end then you will need to manually edit the playlist entry (Ctrl+E in the Winamp playlist editor) to duly alter the url to allow Winamp to play it.
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