not sure if this should be in here or sound

[mangamannumber1]

A friend of mine had some music on his computer that he had put on a flash drive and moved to mine. I'm trying to import them into WMM but when i try the files don't show up, as if they're not even there. When i check to see what kind of file type it is it just say "winamp file"


so i was wondering what to do, i think i remember people say that you can change the file type with winamp but i don't know how, so if that's the problem.

note: he was using a MAC and I'm on a PC if it makes if it's important

[Scintilla]

When i check to see what kind of file type it is it just say "winamp file"

Turn off "Hide known file extensions" and tell us what extension the file has.

[mangamannumber1]

When i check to see what kind of file type it is it just say "winamp file"

Turn off "Hide known file extensions" and tell us what extension the file has.

... me no find it. were is it? in prefrences?

[Scintilla]

When i check to see what kind of file type it is it just say "winamp file"

Turn off "Hide known file extensions" and tell us what extension the file has.

... me no find it. were is it? in prefrences?

In Windows Explorer, Tools menu --> Folder Options... -> View tab, in the Advanced Settings list box.

[mangamannumber1]

When i check to see what kind of file type it is it just say "winamp file"

Turn off "Hide known file extensions" and tell us what extension the file has.

... me no find it. were is it? in prefrences?

In Windows Explorer, Tools menu --> Folder Options... -> View tab, in the Advanced Settings list box.

ok, It says there .m4a files, I've never even heard of thoes before, but this is coming from someone who 4 months ago had never heard of winrar

[Scintilla]

ok, It says there .m4a files, I've never even heard of thoes before, but this is coming from someone who 4 months ago had never heard of winrar

Oh geez. That's an MPEG-4 audio file, which means that the audio stream is probably... what's the standard, AAC?

I have no experience working with these files myself, but I'm sure that a quick AltaVista search will turn up some programs you can use to decode the file. What you want is to convert it to an uncompressed PCM .WAV file, as that's generally easiest for programs like WMM to handle. Plus, it's lossless, so there's no generational loss of fidelity.

[CrackTheSky]

m4a files are the files that are encoded especially for iTunes (although they may be used for other things as well). You're probably going to want to convert those to MP3...I use the trial version of Xilisoft to convert my files to MP3. The problem with the trial version is that it only encodes the first five minutes of any song, so songs longer than five minutes get cut off early :/

[CrackTheSky]

Sorry, double post - Xilisoft can also convert to the .wav format, which is the better choice, as Scintilla said.

[Kariudo]

m4a...sounds like an itunes music file.
anyway, winamp sohuld be able to play it, and you can convert audio files using winamp.

open the file in winamp, go to options, preferences then scroll down the list until you see "output" under plugins
click output once, then look on the right half of the menu for "Nullsoft disk-writer plugin"

click that and click the configure button.
next, click the output directory, and make desktop your output directory (so you can find the file)

next, look for the output file type drop-down menu, and select "force wav file"

then click ok, and exit out of the preferences menu.
now hit play...you won't hear any sound, but that's normal (it's just converting the file)

when you're done you'll want to go back into the options, preferences menu and go back to output, and click "directSound output"
then exit out of the preferences menu and winamp
(this makes sure that you resume playing files instead of converting them)

I'm not as knowledgeable about audio...so this may be barbaric bashing of the audio (like sending a mob to beat up a person until they convert to .wav) so if anyone knows a better way of doing this using winamp please post it.

your version of winamp might be different, but it shouldn't be too different between versions