m4a

My previous post on playing m4a files using Winamp is no longer useful as the 3ivx plug-in expires after a while. Therefore, please use the following solution:

• Uninstall 3ivx if you have it installed from my previous post.
• Visit Rarewares and download the MP4 Input Plugin for Winamp.
• Unzip the file (in_mp4.zip) and move the resulting in_mp4.dll file to your Winamp plug-ins folder, which commonly resides at C:\Program Files\Winamp\Plugins.

I needed to set up WinAMP to play m4a [MPEG-4 Audio] files, but was told that the only way to play it would be once I'd installed Quicktime on the system. However, I, like a lot of people suffer from a congenital [sic] aversion for QT - everything about it right from its file size, clunky interface, unintuitive short cuts, annoying tray icon, file association hijacking, browser hijacking, to the whole you-have-to-download-iTunes-or-suffer-the-consequences marketing BS, really gets under my skin.

So, I do my utmost to keep it away from my box with the same fervour as other rubbish like Real Player, [anything by] Yahoo! and the like. But, in the case of getting my m4a files playable via WinAMP [transcoding isn't really an option here], I was seemingly banging my head against a brick wall. Anyways, after much digging around, I found that it's actually rather simple, but just not documented well enough - hence this post :P