Thin Ice

Bad WMP day

Two CDs arrived in the mail today. First task was to rip them to WMA Lossless.

CD#1, Alex Kharlamov's Posa Somata, Posa Pneumata was recognized correctly, but the Album Artist details were right-padded with a few dozen blank spaces. Almost two years after a Windowsmedia PM wrote me to say this issue was finally under control, it obviously isn't. Extra whitespace in Artist and Album details is one of those non-obvious gotchas that create multiple apparently identical nodes in the Media Player library. BTW if you see multiple "Unknown" nodes, then it's usually because there is (1) the system "Unknown" (which if I had my druthers would be flagged a little differently) corresponding to a blank field entry; (2) the likely presence of a field with the text "Unknown" typed into and possibly (3) a field with "Unknown " with some spaces padding out the right of the field. The bext cure is to delete the text from cases (2) and (3), and then all the "Unknowns" are filed together.

CD#2, Simply Gifts was also recognized correctly, but the Album Art is for a totally different album that doesn't correspond for Artist, Title, track details, country etc. There's really no way of notifying the database minders (ha!) in the way that you would say notify Amazon of an error in a listing. Microsoft appears to be beyond correction in this sphere. I scanned the CD cover and created my own jpeg album art. I attempted to add this file to the WMA files I'd ripped, but for some reason the Advanced Tag Editor is having one of its "I'm not going to play, and I'm not even going to give you an error" days, where it simply fails silently when attempting to add an image file to any or all of the WMAs. I replaced all of the folder's Album Art files with the correct image, but WMP does not like that, and has chosen to show the "quaver" placeholder art instead. It doesn't like being corrected. Luckily I have Jet Audio installed, and I can edit WMA tags (including adding album art) via an Explorer contact menu. Sadly I can't bulk edit the tracks as WMP's Advanced Tag Editor would normally allow, but it works! Sadly though, the correct album art still doesn't show up in either WMP's Now Playing pane or the Advanced Tag Editor.

Fixing MP3 files with unrecognized Duration tags

I have many MP3 files ripped with WMP 9 or later that have the duration recorded as 0:00 seconds, or as some low, but still incorrect figure. I reported this problem some time during v9 (and submitted samples to one of the WMP testers), but have not seen any reply/fix/improvement. There's no particular pattern as to which files missed out on getting this, but it's pretty widely scattered over many dozens of albums. None of the tracks are VBR - most are 160kbps. The major problem with this lack of timing field is that you can't burn audio CDs that include such tracks.

I was hoping to use a WMP Auto Playlist to pick out all these files. The syntax restricts me to looking for Music in My Library: Length (in seconds) Is Less Than 30. Once done, however, WMP shoots me a an error dialog "The Property was not Found" and a link to an unhelpful Web Help page, and no items are returned.

If I go to the All Music list in my library and sort by Length, then I find the hundreds of items which satisfy the query I tried to create above. To get a count, I should just be able to select them and shoot them over to the Now Playing List, but WMP watchers know that will simply add every file from the current list (in this case ALL FILES). Instead, I create a new static playlist that gives me a count of 741 zero-length files, with a total estimated time of 5:15hrs and file size 1.25GB.

If I inspect the ID3 tags of randomly selected files, using MP3Tag or DBPoweramp utility, I find that, in fact all have reasonable and consistent length tags which seem to be inaccessible to Media Player and Explorer.

NB Playing the files in WMP does NOT update this tag.

I dug around on the net and eventually hit on this Winamp trick from the WMP 10 FAQ. The article references Winamp 2.x, but I used Winamp 5.07 and I modified the tip thus: clear one set of tags, update, copy tags over, update, clear other tag, update, copy tags over, update. It does work, but very tedious, and I would still like to know why some tracks ripped from a single album are affected in this fashion.

WMP article: Housekeeping tips: moving your media files and removing duplicates

Direct link. All WMP articles here or see Article Categories over to the left.

Updates to WMP 10 library bug list [total = 43]

Full list maintained here

41. Now Playing list in Library is empty despite one or more tracks being displayed in the Now Playing Pane [added 2005-3-13]

42. If you rip a new copy of an album, then WMP will move the tracks previously ripped from into the same folder as the newly ripped tracks. The old folder is deleted - even if it had a different name. ( All rename & rearrange options turned off. Old files were MP3, newer were lossless WMA. Repro'd multiple times) [added 2005-3-13]

43. WMP cannot read Duration tag from some MP3 headers even though every other bit of freeware/payware shareware media software I tried has no difficulty, and the files were ripped with WMP. Playing the files in WMP does *not* update the tags as Microsoft claimed. Consequence: files cannot be burnt to audio CD. Lengthy workaround: rebuild tags with Winamp. [added 2005-3-13]

OCA recommends Microsoft Anti-Spyware

I had to crash out of MSN Messenger as it had hung on a dialog while selecting a new display picture. I sent an error report, and in response I got redirected to the Windows Online Crash Analysis site, which included the following paragraph:

* This problem might also be resolved by installing and running an anti-spyware program. We recommend Microsoft® Windows® AntiSpyware, which is currently available as a beta release. You can find out more information here: http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/spyware/software/default.mspx

Somehow I don't think this is an appropriate place to advertise another Microsoft product.

WMP v10 security update - A Fumble in the Box

Ed Bott writes in his post How to fumble a security update about the Media Division's expectation that users will reference the WMP FAQ to learn how to use the security update effectively.

It seems that the designers of this update expect a degree of sophistication (in dealing with social engineering techniques) an order of magnitude or two beyond that which the update might cover.

Trustworthy Computing should not require that the user study the fine-print on a contract they're unaware of.