An update, at last!

Yes, this update is hopelessly delayed. I could probably blame my new job for it, but that would be unfair. Truth is, I just too damn lazy.
But, lo and behold, here it is! Without further ado, I present you the Christmas (!) update to ReallyRareWares: A much improved Musepack section, reflecting the recent removal of the same section from RareWares. There are countless Musepack versions there, most of them kindly contributed by Guruboolez.
I would promise you a new update soon, but even I wouldn't really believe that, so you'd better just keep checking for news... :-)

Foobar2000 and a surprise

I was planning to only make an update near Christmas, but so many nice dudes submitted old versions of foobar2000, that I decided to make a quick update and add a foobar page to the site.
The collection is still far from complete, therefore, if you happen to have an old version of this player not yet featured at the foobar page, please send it to my e-mail address (available at the About page)
Also, I added a hidden surprise. Look around for it, and you'll eventually find...
Until Christmas!

Updates

Hello. Here is another update for the faithful visitors of ReallyRareWares.
This is what has just been added:

• Countless versions of the NAD music player contributed by Mitiok
• Pretty much every former version of EAC, contributed by digitalx.org
• A clarification on Sonique2's story by a guy that was there and saw what happened
• The now-dead Compaact! AAC and MP4 encoder by zPlane.development
• Several older versions of SoloH MPGenc contributed by Mitiok
• The famous K-Jöfol music player - first to play VQF and only one to play Astrid AAC

That's it for now. I plan to run another update by the end of the year, as a christmas gift for you guys.
See you then!

Wow! A new update at last!

Hello. This update is mainly focused on players. These are the players I'm bringing you for your nostalgia pleasure:

• Musearc 4.4.97.3 beta
• NAD player 0.93
• Sonique 2 alpha - the infamous leaked version
• XAudio MP3 player 0.9a
• Yamp player 3.3

Also, I added the Macintosh versions of Daxwav - appropriately called Daxaif - and an older version of WinGOGO.
Enjoy!

Christmas gifts

Hello. I'm here bringing you some Christmas gifts taken out from obscure and forgotten places in the web.

For starters, an unexpected development: Mr. Volodymyr Poltavets actually took his time to adapt Split2000 to modern Linux versions. You can find his diff files and precompiled binaries at the Split2000 page.
Just for sake of completeness, I added several TruesSpeech players for different platforms: Win16, Mac68K and MacPPC.
Mr. Zack Jelesoff pointed me out to updates on the Mio encoder (Daru) and Winamp plugin, so they have been updated at the Mio page.
I also added browser plugins for Echospeech playback, for Win32 and Win16.
Finally, I added a page for rare or deprecated CoolEdit/Audition import/ export filters.

New additions

Today I added to the lame page several very old versions, courtesy of 384kbps. Included are some versions that seem to only work in OS/2. If there is some way to get them to run on Win32, please drop me a mail with instructions.

I'm also opening an exception and adding an audio editor to the collection: CoolEdit 1.3.1, a Win16 version of the famous editor dating from 1993!

Last but not least, I added some interesting programs submitted by the always helpful Marco Pontello. They are VocPack - an extremely old lossless compressor - and wav2mp, an MP1/MP2 encoder.

Impressive response!

It's been a few hours since I wrote my request for Mafuka, and it's already been taken care of! Very big thanks to Elohe from Spain for providing this hard-to-find encoder.

I'm also taking the opportunity to upload Plugger 0.3, kindly provided by 384kbps, and mppenc 1.7.9c, the last version developed by Andree Buschmann.

Another update, and a request

First, I would like to assure visitors that I haven't forgotten about RRW. You don't need to worry when 4 months pass by without updates. By it's nature, RRW will be updated very seldomly from now on, since I already uploaded pretty much my entire collection of rarities and you don't find rare audio-related programs everyday.

Today, I uploaded several new versions of l3enc, including a version even older than 1.0 (0.99a!). According to l3enc's history.txt, this is the second version released to the public - the first was 0.99, that I couldn't find anywhere.

Last but not least, I would like to ask visitors to check if they have the very infamous Mafuka encoder and decoder lying somewhere. I would love to feature it here, and extensive web searches resulted in no leads. If you have it, please drop me a mail.

Some more updates

I added some more goodies today:

• Nullsoft DOSamp MP3 player
• Split2000 lossless codec
• FhG's layer 3 FAQ and test bitstreams
• More old versions of Blade
• Shine fixed point MP3 encoder
• Mirror of Thor's page at DalnetVQF

Talk about weird

Coming from the premier resource of oddities and weirdness (to western eyes anyway) - Japan - is the very rare and virtually unknown Mio format. A page about it has been just added to the Weird Formats section.

Players and WavPack

In this update, I added old versions of the popular WavPack lossless audio encoder, and a Players section featuring several old audio players.

Finally an update!

Finally I ceased slacking and updated several parts of the site:

• FhG MP3enc MP3 encoder
• EchoSpeech voice codec
• Voyce Tech SpchComp
• Arminio Grgic's very strange WavSquiq
• MPEGplus SV5 apps, including a very rare decoding library

Hopefully the updates will be more frequent now.

First ever MP3 encoder:

I just added to the MP3 section a real rarity: l3enc 1.00 for DOS.
This was the first publicly available MP3 (back then called MPEG layer 3) software encoder, released on June 1994. And it still works, creating perfectly compliant (at least on my limited tests) MP3 streams!

Site Launch:

Hello, and be welcome to ReallyRareWares, a site for researchers (or nostalgic people like me) that miss the old days of multimedia encoding.

Here you'll find reviews and history of old software (encoders and decoders), deceased codecs (VQF, ePAC), oddities (AUPECg2, Astrid AAC), and so on, as well as downloads.

Also, I count on your help to make this collection more complete. If you have some very rare and old audio encoder or decoder which isn't featured here, please drop me a mail. Information on historical facts and corrections to the articles featured here are also very welcome.

Enjoy!

Roberto Amorim.