Flutterby™! : Mac woes

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Mac woes

2005-06-20 17:01:14.90309+00 by Dan Lyke 3 comments

Okay, Mac mavens: How the heck do you get the horror that is iTunes 4.8 to play Ogg Vorbis files? Every codec I've downloaded for it has crashed, and despite the fact that Fink has XMMS available, this machine lacks anything in /dev/* that looks like a valid audio device.

[ related topics: Music Macintosh ]

comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment Re: made: 2005-06-20 17:54:48.596825+00 by: jims

VLC runs nicely. I can't say I've played an ogg through it though it claims that it knows how. Just my 2 cents on why you can't do it in iTunes... There was a project to make an ogg vorbis plugin for quicktime, but the coders were not up to the task and it was never a stable, usable piece of code and appears to have been abandoned. I suspect the persistent, unsubstantiated reports of imminent ogg support from Apple keep anyone from coding it.

On Apple's side, they probably can't roll out ogg for iTunes until they commit to supporting it in iPods and at least the first gen iPods probably can't do it, or will decimate their battery life from the compute overhead. First gen iPods are old now and maybe it's ok to partially orphan them. I suppose podcasters could be the reason that forces this to happen if enough of them are podcasting only in ogg to avoid the mp3 royalty problems.

#Comment Re: made: 2005-06-21 01:00:46.776867+00 by: Brian

A friend tells me that the .ogg plugin doesn't work with the new quicktime (7). If you aren't running Tiger, you can downgrade Quicktime and then the plugin should start working again. If you are on Tiger, you may be out of luck.

#Comment Re: made: 2005-06-21 12:32:19.26094+00 by: DaveP

As others have mentioned, .ogg support on Mac is pretty limited/lame. I don't even try to play them.