conversion to previous versions of WMA

[anrquevideo]

It appears that in current NLEs and the Windows Media Encoder that you can do WMV7, 8 and 9 but only flavors of WMA9 for audio. Does anyone have a solution for encoding to the old WMA7 and 8 audio codecs short of building up a Windows 2000 or 98 box? As to why I'm doing this, it's to verify some other tools against the old formats.

[machf]

Hmmm... actually, since MS made its VirtualPC available for free, you wouldn't need to "build up a Windows 2000 o 98 box".
Can't you install an old version of WME separately? I think I have a couple of them lying around...

[anrquevideo]

I'm not using a Mac so I wouldn't install Virtual PC.

The problem is with newer versions of Windows Media Encoder installed the older codecs get deleted or over-written. Again, the video codecs are still available to encode to, but the audio codecs are gone.

Anybody else have any ideas?

[Ai Haibara]

Actually, there's a PC version, too. I think machf suggested it so that you can have another Windows environment in which to install earlier versions of Windows Media Encoder, without worrying about them overwriting your latest version.

[machf]

Yep, that's what I meant... installing a different version of Windows within a VM running inside your current Windows installation. If everything else that you've tried fails, you can do that. You can download VirtualPC 2004 here.

[anrquevideo]

Okay, I've tried this. However instead of running Virtual PC, I ran VMware and tried both Windows 2000 and Windows 98 SE. I found a copy of Windows Media Encoder 7.1 and loaded that. This gets me part of the way there.
With WME 7.1 I can encode WMV8 with WMA 8. There is a video codec for WMV7 but NO AUDIO. This is quite the nightmare. Anybody know where/how I can encode to the old WMA7?
Thanks loads for the suggestions.

[machf]

I found a similar discussion here. It's suggested that aside from WME 7.1, you only install WMP 7.1 and its codecs.