Winamp goes lossless

Some of you may know that I’m currently looking for the right company, for the right job. Until such event occurs, that also means that I have some “free time”. Well, let’s say that for a hard-worker like me this doesn’t mean watching stupid programs on TV, I don’t own any TV set anyway, but this means that I’m using this free time to do all the things I said once “I’ll do it when I’ll have the time”.

So during this time I re-opened some old projects, finalising them, correcting long-term bugs. I’m also working on this website, and believe me this is a lot of work!! Also as I have always done by the past I’m reading the IT actuality, but also studying a lot of computer science articles, tutorials and many more... That also means many test programs... and sometimes the need to do something standing like a final product: although I’m comfortable with theory, I also enjoy when sometimes it turns into something concrete.

And here we are, yet another Winamp plug-in! I chose an encoder because it was supposed to be a short project, not eating more than a couple of days: as a matter of fact I made it in two days.

So the plug-in is an encoder to rip CDs tracks to the FLAC file format, everything by using Winamp. FLAC is a popular lossless compressed format (exact copies of CD tracks, contrary to Mp3 or AAC), free, not patended, and very popular (even supported by some hardware devices).

My FLAC CD ripping encoder artwork

That was the first time I was working on a strictly audio related plug-in, and in fact that wasn’t as complicated as I was afraid! I must congratulate the FLAC project for the high quality of their work: the project is very well documentated (but could be improved nevertheless), so that I was able to write my encoder in a decent time... but that was without counting on the famous Nullsoft renown about documenting stuffs! Usually they are just kind enough to unbind a raw header file of Winamp public APIs. I was astonished to see that there didn’t exist any third-party encoder for Winamp, but with retreat, it’s just that Nullsoft hadn’t provided the required materials. Anyhow I lost a good amount of time reverse-engineering the interface. That’s now done, and I could certainly by now write another encoder in a couple of hours! I may anyway write something on this subject soon, to save time of interrested developers.

Options for the FLAC encoder

So the encoder is now ready to ship, kindly tested by Winamp forum’s members. After having exploited my C and Win32 skills, I wrote some pages for this website to detail further the encoder and its options, feel free to have a try!

At the same time I made some updates on the official FLAC input plug-in. Additionally to fixing some old subsisting bugs, I added the long awaited full support for the new Winamp 5 media library. I’ve been told there was an attempt of read-only support once, but which didn’t last for long for whatever reasons. One short day of work later, and this is all done. Combined with my encoder, it makes the preferred, and only, lossless format to be used with Winamp 5. In one word, Winamp goes lossless...