December 2004 - Posts

Wed, Dec 22 2004 19:19

Lighter moments in metadata

I was reading David Edelstein's hilarious article on recent movies, and followed a link to NPR's yearly run-down of movies and music., only to find several samples like this:

Unlisted Artist: Unlisted CD Title: Sorry This Music Is Not In Our Database Label: Thank You Composer: Unlisted Year: 2001

Posted by Mike | with no comments
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Tue, Dec 21 2004 21:52

Energy Bliss visualization - album display bug

I just noticed when jumping from playback of k.d.lang's album Ingenue to Pierre-Laurent Aimard's account of the Debussy Image that this visualization did not update the album information, so I saw the new track name, but the Artist and Album information were not changed. Repro'd this with some other album-jumps. Screen-shot available on application...

Addendum (23/12): if you start a new track from outside of WMP (e.g. launching from Explorer) then the visualization doesn't update any details.

& again (26/12): Turns out these problems have been reported to the Energy Bliss developer via www.wmplugins.com, but as far as I can determine, the developer has not been able to repro.

Posted by Mike | with no comments
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Tue, Dec 14 2004 14:33

Album Art display in Energy Bliss visualization

Zach writes in his mini-FAQ: The WMP10 Energy Bliss visualization shows Album Art only if the art is in a separate file and only if it is assigned the name "Folder.jpg" or "AlbumArtSmall.jpg". It will also display album art assigned filename "AlbumArt_WMID_Large.jpg" or "AlbumArt_WMID_Small.jpg", but since the average user doesn't understand how to get the WMID, we'll ignore that. You'll get WMID Album Art for the file if you use "Find Album Info" on the track within the library.

I found that "folder.jpg" did not work, whereas "AlbumArtSmall.jpg" does. If no appropriately-named file is available, Energy Bliss either shows an empty (transparent) box OR or a picture of a CD in a jewel case OR nothing at all (not even track name). Creating a shortcut to "folder.jpg" and renaming it "AlbumArtSmall.jpg" does not work (this sort of redirection hss been known to work elsewhere in Microsoft products. but some file-open code is more literal).

Posted by Mike | 1 comment(s)
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Thu, Dec 9 2004 18:17

WMP Artist fields - update 2

A further update to that article: If the Album Artist field is empty, WMP will create a node in that (Album Artist) tree, based on the first listed Contributing Artist (if that field is not empty).

One of the consequences of this, is that if you have a bunch of tracks that are listed under an Album Artist node "Foo 1"and some of them are there because their Contributing Artist field is blank, then you drag them all to another Album Artist node "Foo 2", then some will have their Album Artist field change, and some will have their Contributing Artist field changed. Of course, WMP only asks for confirmation of a change of Artist field. And an unqualified Artist field can mean almost anything in WMP...

Posted by Mike | with no comments
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