Thin Ice : Windows Media Player

Why I still don’t like iTunes

Mike — Sat, 26 Nov 2005 03:21:00 GMT

Yesterday I had to download the new version of iTunes? Why? Well I had a .MOV(Apple Video format) file that I wanted to watch, and when I tried to play it, I was told that my version of Quicktime had expired and I’d have to download a new version (v7) before I could watch this file. And for a few versions now, Apple has been bundling iTunes with Quicktime, so you’re forced to install both if you want Quicktime.

Curious to see what improvements might have been made, I started it up. It asked me a few questions, and I could quickly see the big reason that I was not going to use it: it will not work directly with WMA files. iTunes demands that all such files are converted to Apple’s proprietary (but not licensable) format from Microsoft’s proprietary (but licensable) format. It does not demand this of MP3 (another proprietary, licensable format) files. Most of my files have been ripped to WMA-Lossless and even if thought AAC was a lovely format, I simply don’t have another 100GB or so spare disk-space to accommodate converted files. [---]

Moving on…

I allowed iTunes to look for music files to add to my library. It didn’t look beyond my root drive, so I had to tell it where else to go to find the root folder for the files I keep on my local drives. All of those files are backed up elsewhere, so I felt safe running this experiment.

After a while, it added about 5000 MP3 files to the library – i.e. passing over the WMA files. While this was in process I noticed that the music file monitor for my iRiver portable device was getting excited about something and had started a lengthy reprocessing of my music files. Sho’ nuff, iTunes had not only touched all of my MP3 files (the file-system Date Modified tag was altered), but it had re-tokenized all of the Artist fields, so that instead of using the ‘;’ delimiter, it now used ‘/’. Was this *really* necessary? If someone at Apple thought that the latter was more aesthetically pleasing, then they should have ASKED ME. [---]

I was about to write about the lack of special views for Artists and Albums, but the Browse button, top right (looks like an eye) opens some top-loading panes that allow filtering by Genre, Artist and Album. These do allow you to multiply select items, to create filters ?, but there is no way to do this for Composer, which is a big drawback for those with substantial Classical and Jazz collections. [--]

Apple does not expose an Album Artist field, which is very helpful in filtering a large collection (even just scanning my list of [Contributing] Artists in WMP is time consuming). [-]

Like WMP, iTunes has trouble with tokenizing Artist fields. Except that after retokenizing all the artist fields in nearly 5000 MP3 files it still presents every track’s list of artists as one conglomerated string e.g. “Jo Partridge/Barry Morgan/Ken Freeman/Jeff Wayne/Ra” – and that string is truncated, without so much as a tooltip to show me the entire string.[-]

iTunes does not find, play or otherwise acknowledge WMV (video) files. Even if it didn’t play them back, I sure as hell would like library software to LIST EVERYTHING.

Minor quibbles

I hate modal dialogs that could be replaced with more graceful modifications of the current display. For example, click on “Music Store” in the left pane. I get a big Apply white right pane with “iTunes Music Store” AND overlaid is an ugly little dialog saying it could not connect and to please remedy the matter. Could that not have been incorporated as text in the main display area, like a smart 404 error page in an internet browser?

Ugly little Options dialogs that do not seem to be stylistically part of the program. For example, those for Library and Visualization Options don’t seem to be from the same program as the Get Info dialog.

iTunes doesn’t automatically discover video files in your My Videos folder.

No context-sensitive help.

Things I Do Like

This is not an exhaustive list, as the major problems above preclude any day to day use of iTunes for my collection. This is what I found after playing around with the software for about an hour as I wrote these impressions.

[++] The search facility is VERY fast. I like that it filters the view on the fly as I type in my search string. (WMP’s search doesn’t fly….it drifts…like continents). iTunes also includes the Composer field in the search scope, which WMP still does not do. If I keep adding words then I can quickly filter by multiple criteria e.g. “Porter Ella” is going to give me all Cole Porter compositions sung by Ella Fitgerald. I’m still waiting for a Picasa-like Google media manager that will offer me more advanced syntax like “Porter -Ella" i.e. all Cole Porter compositions NOT sung by Ella Fitzgerald. … And then, I would save that as a playlist (optionally dynamic).

[-]I did notice that it was relatively easy to have some text in the search box that generated a nil result (no tracks found), and there was no feedback elsewhere on the screen to indicate that a filter had been applied. It looks like you’ve lost all your music when this has happened.

[+] The “Show Duplicate Files” (based on both title and artist being repeated) filter is handy for house-keeping purposes. However it is handicapped by the lack of a “File Path” field so that I can see why I have a duplicate. I have to right click > Show Song File (or Get File Info), on each and every file to discover this information.

[+] Folder and Playlist customization. I tried “File > New Folder” and got a new top level item in the left pane. I kept trying to drag tracks there, but it wasn’t until I searched through the Help file for a while that I discovered that I could only put Playlists or other folders there. This is another area where embedded help would be helpful.

[_] Auto-Complete was, in general, much more useful than that in WMP, which is so broken as to be useless (who needs auto-complete for track numbers????)

In short, I cannot use software that

cannot natively handle the file format of the majority of my collection

makes major changes to my data without warning

I have no desire to be tied into an Apple-, Microsoft- or any other- world. The two afore-mentioned demonstrate from their media offerings that they still have a lot to learn, although they are both much better than the Philips and Sony packages. I’d like to see a really competitive/competent offering.

Beware Philips DMM

Mike — Tue, 06 Sep 2005 14:07:00 GMT

While staying with some friends in the UK recently, I was asked to help straighten out their digitized music collection, and help with using a newly purchased Philips HDD120 MP3 player.

I found that their PC reproduced many problems I had experienced with WMP 9/10 regarding overwriting of local metadata even with corresponding WMP options turned off. Microsoft is still in denial over this issue. Apparently Jim Allchin has read items in this blog but we're still a world away from his WMP team addressing any of the issues which affect consumer data. When I say “affect”, it's a euphemism for “destroy”.

Meanwhile, at Philips software department, a similar low standard and atmosphere of denial persists. I installed their DMM (Digital Music/Media Manager) software which accompanies their MP3 player. I also made a point of getting a more up to date version of that software from their website. I found that the software has a maddening problem (in addition to its maddening synch slowness) - it requires that the user be a Windows Administrator ie not use a Limited profile on Windows XP. Whereas most software can be installed once by an Administator account and thence be available to all accounts on that machine, the DMM software has to be installed individually for each account. There's a twist though, if you install for a second account, then the software goes into uninstall mode, therefore ensuring it only works for a single user on the machine. Heaven forbid that a family have one PC and multiple MP3 players!

Anyway, once you have installed the software, you cannot expect to revert to a Limited profile, because

a) the software will not load past the splash screen. It gives an error "The application can not start (OK)" and then
closes.

b) the device is not recognized as connected (although Windows Explorer sees the removable hard drive)

unless the profile stays as an Administrator. It seems that Philips does not recognize the security risks inherent in running every day as an Administrator, particularly if always connected to the internet via broadband.

When I put this issue to Philips support initially their response (2-Sep-2005) was:

Thank you for your recent e-mail.

With regards to your query we can advise that the software may have
been installed, while the computer was logged in on the Admin account,
therefore the Limited account will not recognise the software as being
fully installed.
We would advise that you verify this, and if you find that the
software has been installed on the Limited Account only, but you are
still receiving this message, that you contact us, in order to resolve
the matter.

We trust that the information provided will be of assistance.

Should you require any further information please contact our Customer
Care Centre (details below) quoting customer reference number
50-59047542.

When I replied, with additional details (including item #2 above), and confirming the behaviour on 2 other PCs, the response (5-Sep-2005) was:

With regards to your query we can advise that this is normal, the DMM
software will only recognise the unit, if the computer is logged in on
the same 'Profile' as where the software has been installed.

... completely ignoring any of the issues outlined.

I subsequently googled on “Philips DMM Administrator” to see if there were solutions listed by other users. The most edifying was the first hit from 10-11-2004, which may predate the release of the device in question, and certainly goes back some versions of the DMM software:

Recently I spoke to an ex collegue, who left our company for Philips research in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. He had been running around the consumer product labs for 3 months, and he told me this story about the development and marketing of the HDD100:
"They had just made the first version of the player, and now they (the developers) had to ram together some software to make it at least work, so they would be able to show something to the marketing guys. What they came up with was more a 'proof of concept', not intended for the consumer at all. Some big hotshot saw that it more or less worked and said: "That's good enough, put it on the market ". The developers protested, but to no avail. The software, which was in an alpha stage at best, became the official software as we now no it."
So don't blame the developers, but blame the big bosses at Philips that gave us this software for a device that cost me 500 euro (I was an early adopter):
-You have to have administrator rights to be able to run the software. [etc]

Update: Philips (Sep-6-2005) now parrot back my problem report:

With regards to your query we can advise that in order for the
application to run properly you would need to execute DMM under a
profile with Administrator Rights. If you are unsure, we suggest that
you consult with your Network Administrator.

We trust that the information provided will be of assistance.

Should you require any further information please contact our Customer
Care Centre (details below) quoting customer reference number
50-59047542.

Although their software has been updated this year, it appears Philips have no intention of addressing this usability/security issue. And how many home users have a Network Administrator to consult? ... and wouldn't such an Administrator want all the accounts they support set to Limited??

Update Sep-7-2005. Philips write:

With regards to your query we can advise that there are no security
issues and that it is not dangerous running your operating system
using an Administrator profile. As you are fully aware the software
does require an Administrator level profile to install the software.
It is the same to run the software as you need be logged in to a
profile with Administrator rights for it to be able to execute the
application. [My italics]

Compare, for instance Michael Howard's (Microsoft Security Engineering) basic mantra:

I've said this many times, but I'll say it again, "Running with an administrative account is dangerous to the health of your computer and your data." So, whenever someone says they must operate their computers as administrators, I always try to persuade them it's not the correct thing to do from a security perspective. That said, every once in a while I meet someone who has a valid reason. For example, I use one of the computers in my office to install the latest daily build of Windows, and I need to be an administrator to install the OS. However, and this is a big point, I do not read e-mail, browse the Web, or access the Internet in any form when running as an administrator on that machine. And I do not do so because the Web is the source of most of the nasty attacks today.

Philips's subsequent messages have been:

With regards to your query we can advise that you should contact our
customer service helpdesk on the following number should you wish to
discuss this case further.

I have called them on earlier occasions, and found their staff scrambling to find any documentation for their products beyond the bare-bones help included with DMM. I've suggested that any solution can be outlined easily in an email, rather than a lengthy, expensive (and probably unproductive) phone-call.

I searched the web for more background on this software and keep encountering end-users who have returned the product because they cannot get around the errors I've outlined. Philips are out of touch with their customers.

September 14 - Philips offer a magic solution i.e. ignore all earlier parts of the conversation and start repeating earlier incorrect advice. Reminds me of a similar recent thread with iRiver tech support.

With regards to your query we can advise that you simply need to
install the software on the specific profile that you would like to
use the Programme on.

English = English(US)?

Mike — Sun, 01 May 2005 05:50:00 GMT

All over the microsoft.com site I see confused, misrepresented directives for English language versions of Microsoft products : "must be running English(US)".

For example, Windows XP Powertoys: "PowerToys will only work with US-English regional settings." Which regional settings? All of them, one of them? What would happen if one or more were set to English(UK) or some other English locale? Nothing I suspect, but there is a terrible confusion over locale vs location vs language.

The Windowsmedia Player v10 readme says: If you reside in another country or region [to English(US)], we recommend that you wait for the version of Windows Media Player 10 for your country or region to be released before installing. Here's news: there are no versions of Windowsmedia Player localized for English locales outside of the United States.

Even Microsoft Office is not exempt from this foolishness; many downloads are said to be for English(US) only. Here's one pulled up at random for a Word 2000 French Speller update, which is titled French Proofing Tools Update for English (US, Canada) Office 2000 even though the update applies to all English language Office installs.

Allchin: minor WMP update this year

Mike — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 16:07:00 GMT

Thomas Hawk passed on news of a minor update to Windows Media Player.

While we're both hopeful of performance improvements for larger media libraries, my main hopes are that they will first address

overwriting of metadata, track file-names and even deletion of tracks which has been evident since v9 was in beta
user control over album art so that correct art (like other metadata) is not overwritten by WMP when it decides your art is wrong: 1 2 3
album updates and search 1 2
linking of error IDs to online resources

Allchin says no WMP fixes until Longhorn

Mike — Sat, 16 Apr 2005 16:42:00 GMT

Thomas Hawk dined with Jim Allchin, and extracted the following titbits:

Microsoft is building the next version of Longhorn Media Center to accommodate much larger digital libraries. As some of you may have read in the past I have had some performance issues with my large .mp3 library. Longhorn will be better able to handle very large digital libraries. Having 500 photos or so in a folder will render quickly and the media player should be able to easily accommodate 100,000 + item media libraries.

Jim did acknowledge that there still were some issues today with Windows Media Player and I shared with him the fact that earlier that day Chris Lanier had blogged that his collection of WMP web help articles now had seen over 1 million views. Jim said that they are working on many of these issues but that a new version of WMP and fixes would not be out until Longhorn. [My emphasis].

I wonder how much user data - files and metadata - will be destroyed by WMP by then? Will the Windowsmedia team actually act constructively regarding user feedback on bugs that they have ignored through two previous betas? Does this translate to fixes for Windows XP and long overdue fixes for Windows 2000 versions of Media Player?

Online store opens in New Zealand

Mike — Thu, 14 Apr 2005 01:47:00 GMT

Six months ago, I changed my Windows User Input Locale setting from English (Australia) to English(New Zealand) to evade the ghastly online stores that had invaded my desktop. When these stores turned up, the album reviews and track listings available through the windowsmedia.com database (the *only* database accessible to WMP users: it's not CDDB and it's not user configurable) were replaced by some really poorly presented rows of unrelated albums generated from the od2.com fugly thumbnail catalog that the vendor wanted to sell. Over the last 6 months, I can confirm that the presentation of this catalog hasn't become any more professional. The ninemsn suggestions are still laid out in a stupefyingly primitive manner.

Tonight I noticed that Digirama had opened as the NZ Music Store, and I thought I may have to reset my locale to English(Belize) (which at time of writing, was still spared the incursion of online stores). Fortunately, the View Album Info function has not been relinquished to the the OD2 fugly thumbnail server and you can still get album reviews from the windowsmedia.com.

If that is lost, I guess I'll be grabbing my scuba gear, sand-fly ointment and heading for Belize...

How much worse will Windowsmedia online database get?

Mike — Fri, 01 Apr 2005 17:53:00 GMT

I've remarked before on a case of Windowsmedia reporting different album information according to whether or not you click the "Find Album Info" or "View Album Info" buttons in Windows Media Player v10. Today I picked up a copy of the latest Verve remixes, and threw it into the computer to rip to Lossless WMA.

WMP didn't automatically pick up the album details, but when I clicked the Find Album Info button, it showed the correct album "Various Artists - Verve Remixed, Vol.3" ... but no track information was included (or album art). Which makes me wonder why AMG even bothers to put the information into the database. I ran a search on "Verve Remixed" but did not find any other records for this, Volume 3. So I returned to the original record, edited the tracks manually and uploaded the details.

Out of curiosity, I clicked the "Find Album Info" - this time I get a different record returned which has all the track titles (but still no album art). Note, these are NOT the ones I uploaded, as I included the remix information in the titles.

It makes me wonder further, if Microsoft and AMG et.al. collectively can't give a damn about maintaining these databases or getting the search code to work, why WMP is not opened up to allow access to other information sources. Since WMP is an integral part of Windows (as we hear so often and so strenuously from Microsoft), doesn't the tying of album-links to a single database basically amount to the same thing as smart-tags redirecting one to a proprietary Microsoft back-end?

WMP Year/Date Released

Mike — Thu, 31 Mar 2005 23:32:00 GMT

There are always new unexplored corners of Windows Media Player ready for experimentation. Usually when I'm in the Library pane, I live in one of the Artist or Composer views. This evening, I expanded the Year Released tree to see what was listed.

First up, you see that the Year Released tree is based on the Date Released field, another of those "let's give every field multiple names" cases in WMP. (See the article on Artist fields on this site, for more examples.)

The expanded nodes start with "Unknown" (ie no data in the field) and then range sparsely from 1899 to 2019. As noted in the WMP Library bug-list, WMP likes to add or subtract 1 from some year ranges, so "1899" in the Year Releasednode corresponds to "1900" in the Date Released tree. This bug has been around since before v9 was released. It's also noticeable in the way that Windowsmedia/AMG album descriptions are usually one year different to the year that is downloaded as track metadata.

[2006 update] Apparently this bug affects all users whose systems operate forward of GMT timezone i.e. GMT+X. Will there be a fix, or will that wait until the US somehow moves into these timezones...?

The few nodes with years > 2005 just have a random selection of tracks that have been mis-labelled. I discover to my surprise that I cannot erase the field (and thereby shuffle these tracks into the Unknown node) or drop the tracks directly onto the Unknown node. All I'm left with is changing the field to another number, so I bulk edit the tracks to be "1900" which um...naturally drops them into the 1899 node. The Advanced Tag Editor does not give you access to this field, so that route is also closed off. I'll probably have to edit the tracks in another program to clear this field.

So, while the layout of trees is visually similar for Album Artist, Contributing Artist, through to Purchased Music there is a fair amount of variation in the way they actually behave. Some are single-valued fields (e.g. Album Artist, Album) where a semi-colon delimiter cannot be used to group a track under multiple headings. Others like Composer, Contributing Artist and Genre are multi-valued: the semi-colon delimiter can be used in this fashion. Within the latter group, there is the further difference that drag-and-drop works differently for Genre. If you drag a track to a Genre node, you are given the option to Change or Add Genres. I find it peculiar that this option does not exist for the other multi-valued fields. And then of course we have the single-valued Year Released which does not allow you to drag tracks onto the Unknown node. This restriction does not exist for the other fields discussed. I *really* hope that none of the folks who designed this have anything to do with WinFS or other metadata-handling elsewhere in Windows UI.

I'll mention in passing that there is also a "Period" field that accepts text, so you could write something like "Baroque" or "1940s". This is somewhat redundant given the multi-valued Genre field already allows me to create such labels. If the "Period" field were coupled with a left-hand pane tree view it might be more useful, so that chronological categories weren't lost amongst the thematic Genre items.

Bad WMP day

Mike — Mon, 21 Mar 2005 23:47:00 GMT

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

Mike — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 03:07:00 GMT

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

Mike — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 02:07:00 GMT

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

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

Mike — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 01:36:00 GMT

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]

WMP v10 security update - A Fumble in the Box

Mike — Thu, 03 Mar 2005 16:49:00 GMT

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.

Updates to WMP 10 library bug list

Mike — Tue, 22 Feb 2005 15:52:00 GMT

Full list maintained here

37. *"Sorting "Artist" field in library by clicking column header only applies to first artist (i.e. up to first semi-colon), so you can't use it to distinguish different sets of artists. Problem doesn't apply to other fields like Album Title [added 2005-2-22]

38. * Media Exporter plug-in only exports a subset of library fields. It (like other features noted above) also ignores additional artists listed in the [Contributing] Artist field, so it is not a complete nor reliable method of backing up or extracting library data [added 2005-2-22]

39. "Find Album Info" may return a different album record for your data than "View album Info". For example Antony and the Johnsons' EP "The Lake" returns a user-uploaded record in the first instance, and a full album review with album art in the 2nd case [added 2005-2-22]

Windows Media Player update to 10.00.00.3802

Mike — Wed, 16 Feb 2005 22:03:00 GMT

An updated build of WMP10 is available from Windows downloads. The readme does not include any details of changes since the prior released build. Certainly the honking great bug of being able to click the “blue gem" button to give the "This type of document does not have a security certificate" error dialog is still proudly available.

The readme does have the usual garbage about US English versions, to whit:

“Availability of online stores for Windows Media Player 10 (US English version)

If you reside in another country or region, we recommend that you wait for the version of Windows Media Player 10 for your country or region to be released before installing."

So pay attention all you folks in the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Singapore, Hong Kong etc: don't download WMP 10 until Microsoft produces a version for you!! Even now, developers are hammering away on updating program resources with spelling modifications ;-).

Hannukah Favorites

Mike — Sat, 08 Jan 2005 05:40:00 GMT

I was clearing out some of the unnecessary seasonal auto-playlists accumulated in Windows Media Player v10, and I thought I'd check out what had been caught by such lists as "Hannukah Favourites". From my collection, that tends to hit a lot of versions of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah covered by John Cale, through U2, Jeff Buckley and k.d.lang, or of Hallelujah I Love Him/Her So covered by Peggy Lee or Ray Charles. More amusing is the Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel covered by the South Park tots on Mr. Hanky's Christmas Classics. All of these are direct hits, more or less in context, from the keywords specified by the auto-playlist.

What really leapt out at me was Rufus Wainwright's Old Whore's Diet linguistically drift-netted by the keyword/substring "Diet", which also scores a few songs by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in my, now decidedly odd Hannukah mix.

The usual northern-hemisphere assumptions are there for the Christmas auto-playlist, which picks up every piece with "Winter" in the title, not to mention anything from Schubert's Winterreise song-cycle. These are more than compensated for by Mr. Hanky's contributions, Stan Ridgeway's Holiday in Dirt album, every song by Noel Coward, Pinta, Nina, Santa Maria (Into Eternity) from Vangelis' soundtrack to 1492: Conquest of Paradise, and various songs about Santa Fe.

These linguistic errors/assumptions are pretty common in Microsoft products due to inefficient use of internal resources built up over the years in the Natural Language Group, Natural Language Research, Reference products (Expedia etc) . Most of these resources have been allowed to drift away through the company or released since no product group is willing to foot the bill for a cost centre of this type. But that is a story for another day...

Lighter moments in metadata

Mike — Thu, 23 Dec 2004 01:19:00 GMT

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

Energy Bliss visualization - album display bug

Mike — Wed, 22 Dec 2004 03:52:00 GMT

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.

Album Art display in Energy Bliss visualization

Mike — Tue, 14 Dec 2004 20:33:00 GMT

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).

WMP Artist fields - update 2

Mike — Fri, 10 Dec 2004 00:17:00 GMT

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...