REQ: Updated WMA decoder

2004-01-04 19:11:08

I have encoded a song with the Foobar2000 CLI to WM9 (Q90 VBR WMA standard), when I retrieve the file info, I get:

Samplerate = 44100
Channels = 2
Bitspersample = 16
Codec = WMA
Bitrate = 223

but when I play the file in WMP9, I get following information:

bitrate: 162Kbps
Audio codec: Windows Media Audio 9
VBR Quality 90, 44 kHz, stereo 1-pass VBR

The bitrate that WMP gives is right, the song is 8min and has a size of 9.37MB. This is a bug of the WMA-info in Foobar2000


I would also like to see the information about which codec has been used (WMA STD, WMA PRO, ...) and the quality (Q90, 192 2 pass-VBR, ...) like WMP does.

I hope this can be fixed.

REQ: Updated WMA decoder

Reply #1 – 2004-01-04 22:03:26

Files encoded with 1-pass-CBR and 2-pass-CBR have the right bitrate displayed in Foobar2000, but 2-pass-VBR is also screwed up.
-> Only CBR files are showing correct bitrate.

REQ: Updated WMA decoder

Reply #2 – 2004-01-04 22:30:35

I second that. It's an old problem. With WMApro VBR, bitrate display is simply incoherent (bitrate are near 4000 or 8000 kbps !?), but I can't say if foo_wma is responsible or if the wrong infos are in the wma files.

REQ: Updated WMA decoder

Reply #3 – 2004-01-05 13:26:12

You should contact esceo, the author of foo_wma component.

REQ: Updated WMA decoder

Reply #4 – 2004-01-18 02:06:20

I will have a look into it, but it may not be something i can do about, because VBRs aren't supposed to have a constant bit rate anyway

REQ: Updated WMA decoder

Reply #5 – 2004-01-18 02:28:23

Also, can you please post a test file somewhere, so that i can try out a few things?

One thing i am certain of though

the bitrate info displayed, is the bitrate info stored in the wma file,

now there are two other bitrate info

one is CurrentBitrate, and the other OptimalBitrate,

i think the CurrentBitrate displays the "Current Bitrate in a vbr file", and this may be the bitrate you are looking at

Codec info can be displayed properly

but the choice of displaying "WMA" in the Codec field was to make it coherent with other input plugins (they all displayed a 3 char codec name)

well, you absolutely need that info, i can display it in some other field

REQ: Updated WMA decoder

Reply #6 – 2004-01-22 10:23:26

And I would also like to see foo_wma support for track and album normalizing either with native WMA tags (WM/WMADRCPeakReference and WM/WMADRCAverageReference) or custom added tags analogous with Replaygain (REPLAYGAIN_TRACK_PEAK and REPLAYGAIN_TRACK_GAIN).

If this is possible i would publish my program for creating this tags.

REQ: Updated WMA decoder

Reply #7 – 2004-01-22 14:24:49

Case did some updates to foo_wma, you can download it here. Not sure it helps any of the issues, but might be interesting to try.