mp3 encoding with out_lame and Winamp

This is a pretty short one, here goes. So I tried re-encoding some .flac music I had to .mp3 today, using a great winamp plugin called out_lame (you can find it here). It's really straight forward to set up; configure your output folder, select out_lame as the output plugin and just play your songs, then watch as they (rather quickly) get converted to mp3. Unfortunately for me Winamp would crash less than a second after starting the process every time I tried this. In the end, it looks like it's because Winamp needs some pretty quick access to the file, and I had been streaming it from my fileserver. I assume trying to re-encode music from anywhere other than a local disk would cause similar problems so there's today's solution: make sure the files you're re-encoding are stored on a local disk.

Nero 8, Nero 9, crashing on startup

So the problem I had today was a customer's nero 9 was screwing up as soon as he opened it, some error about MSXML (I should've just started focussing on that but I decided to ignore it like a dumbass). I planned to uninstall and reinstall nero 9, but when I tried to reinstall the installation failed at around 96%. I was on a bit of a rushed schedule so rather than try again I decided to install nero 8 instead which did the same thing but with a different error: "Warning: GetConfigSet()failed! - (line: 260, file .\NSSModel.cpp).."

This was when I realised this was going to be a pain in the ass to fix, so I started looking around. Seems like this issue is caused by a problem with MSXML (Microsoft XML Core Services). After a lot of screwing around I managed to fix the problem by uninstalling all instances of anything related to MSXML and reinstalling just MSXML 4.0 SP3, nothing else. After that, Nero worked fine without a reinstall.

And that's it. All it required was to remove all the MSXML stuff and reinstall MSXML 4.0 SP3. Hopefully that fixes it for you guys.

Introduction

The idea of this blog is to help people struggling with unusual software issues. I decided one time after spending ages googling a problem only to solve it by myself that it would be a good idea to put my solution out there, but I wasn't sure where to put it. I'll try to keep these short because I'm not much of a writer, but the idea is that everytime I encounter something difficult to fix and succeed in fixing it, I'll post how to do that here.