Microsoft Windows Media Player stops serving up CD album info Microsoft is celebrating the resurgence of interest in physical media in the only way it knows how… by halting the Windows Media Player metadata service. Readers of a certain vintage will remember inserting a CD into their PC and watching Windows Media Player populate with track listings and album artwork. No more. Sometime …
I wish my car's MP3 player would take a similar line and stop pulling info in from a central DB. The info to display,often including album art, is embedded in the file but incorrect album identification is standard, as is album art and its not unknown for the album title to be presented as the name of the track.
If the quality of Microsoft's sources was similar they might accidentally have made an improvement.
> Apparently the title of one of the tracks I ripped from a Nina Simone album is: It might as well be string.
I had a very similar issue with a Mazda CX-5. I ripped my CDs for use in the vehicle - all track information and cover art. The entertainment system decided it knew better and would get alternative information from its own database, including art that certainly didn't match the CD.
The only "fix" I could find online was to initiate an update to the database and interrupt it, so that it failed. Apparently, in the absence of the database, it would revert to use the information embedded with the music files. Shouldn't that be the other way around? I didn't consider that "fix" to be a good option, and so didn't try it.
No longer an issue, for me, as the vehicle has been sold.
As near as I can tell, automotive software is written by people who have never been in a car, much less know how to drive one. And they start from scratch every year or so. My 1999 Lexus had better & less buggy navigation software and entertainment software than my 2025 Toyota.
My car likewise appears to try and show album art for, my surprisingly old school habit, of using USB media. This is fine, but any album with the title (or sub-title) of greatest hist always shows the artwork for Queen's Greatest Hits.
"Essential S Club 7, the greatest hits" with vocals by F. Mercury anyone?
....is down to you and easily remediated, but you'll have to burn new CDs.
audiograbber is a great bit of CD ripping free software I've been using for years that gets the CD info from freedb
mp3tag is a great bit of mp3 tag editing free software I've been using for years.
> I understand that problems often occur on a Monday but by Tuesday they're not so bad.
The reference:
They call it stormy Monday, But Tuesday's just as bad
Lord, and Wednesday's worse, And Thursday's all so bad
The eagle flies on Friday, Saturday I go out to play
Sunday I go to church, yeah, Gonna kneel down and pray
"My LP collection grew +2 …Not listened to a CD in years."
Still dragging a bit of rock along the fragile grooves in a disc of dodgy plastic with an expensive scratch·o·matic phonograph ? How Flintstones !
As the older woman in the music store said when I pooh·poohed the renaissance of the vinyl: "It keeps me in a job". — chacun à son goût
What everhappened to that laser LP. scanner that promised the end of worn out records, shown on something like Tomorrow's World all those years ago... oh, that's right, it was Tomorrow's World, killer of just about every bright new idea of the 1970s/80s/90s
I like my CDs smeared with jam!
You forgot the joke icon.
I suppose you might be able to clamp a 45 – with the big hole punched out – in a Laserdisc player, but that's about it. Probably wouldn't center correctly oh, and LDs (like CDs) play from the inside to the outsise.
I have a working LD player. Watched The Empire Strikes Back over Christmas. Takes all sorts of different sizes of optical media and makes a good fist of playing anything pre-DVD, though I tend to play CDs in my BluRay player these days.
M.
The laser pickup suffered from noise caused by dust. It turned out the conventional stylus does quite a good job of quietly pushing most of the small dust particles out of the way without affecting the sound much, but the optical pickup cannot see through the dust, and leaves it there, playing every particle of dust as an extra click.
> What everhappened to that laser LP. scanner
A blast from the past: 1979, that scanner was used by Crab in an effort to forestall a repeat of the unfortunate effects of playing the record that Tortoise had given him, the LP titled "I Cannot Be Played on Record Player X".
The perhaps astounding thing is how such a simple approach can reproduce sounds at a higher fidelity than their digital replacements.
I knew one hi-fi bluff who worked in a hi-fi store loved to demonstrate this by playing the LP and CD version of the same source in the shop’s very expensive demonstration suite, asking the listener to pay close attention to the triangle part. He, also being a percussionist, would then produce a real triangle to provide a true reference sound.
The best source is uncompressed audio (like FLAC) derived from the master tapes. For all the woes of streaming, Tidal has a fantastic selection of hires audio (and which I have Tidal configured to prefer the use of)
With a good set of speakers and a decent amp, especially on orchestral pieces you can hear the difference between cd quality and master tape quality hires
(However - No I don't subscribe the audiophile mindset of £30 plug fuses and all manner of other snake oil cure alls)
So you are saying you *don't* want to buy these audiophile ethernet cables, carefully marked with arrows so you can plug them in the right way round for best data flow from the server to your smart speaker?
I got you the 12 metre length, it was a snip at ten grand (plus VAT)
playing the LP and CD version of the same source in the shop’s very expensive demonstration suite, asking the listener to pay close attention to the triangle part
Yes, I remember doing that for a friend who was thinking of buying a CD player. She was absolutely blown away by how much clearer and purer the CD was, compared to her brand-new LP of the same album.
On the other hand, most people seem to prefer the warmer sound of LPs to the harder clinical sound of CDs
It doesn't seem to bother me much, but the sound of a BBC live broadcast of something like Glastonbury makes my skin crawl. I've been to a couple of concerts recorded as part of 'Sight and Sound in Concert' (Santana, Hawkwind?) and enjoyed every moment, but the televised version sounded terrible (I think they take the feeds raw and do mixing live rather than in editing)
> most people seem to prefer the warmer sound of LPs to the harder clinical sound of CDs
The real warmth comes from playing the LP through a proper thermionic valve amplifier. You can improve this by careful selection of valves from your stock cupboard: you are looking for ones that can withstand overvolting the filament to 6.5 or even 7 volts.
I’m sure there’s a “tube amp” noise filter that you can play mp3s through.
Yes, just add some extra harmonic distortion, mainly around the 3rd harmonic. That's where the "warm tube sound" comes from, which is mostly due to the design of the amp and the feedback circuit.
I have fond memories of the era of the likes of the HL2 triode. Later, under the blankets at boarding school, a kit for headphones using 'acorn' valves (drank the filament batteries). 10 pm Sunday night, Radio Luxembourg top of the pops, sponsored by Horace Batchelor, Keynsham spelt K-E-Y-N-S-H-A-M Bristol.
you are looking for ones that can withstand overvolting the filament to 6.5 or even 7 volts.
Why? The purpose of heating the cathode is to release enough electrons to carry the required current. Once you have that, overheating the filament to generate an excess of free electrons will do nothing other than burn out the valve/tube more quickly.
I also after such a demonstration brought a CD player etc. because as you note CD’s had both a better/clearer dynamic range (as demonstrated by Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Welcome to the Pleasuredome - which also showed just how bad the bass response was on many speakers) and absence of background noise, thus I accepted that some of my classic albums would not have “perfect detail” percussion - a small compromise compared to the many benefits of the CD format.
I do note the remastered CD’s do tend to be much better than the original and DACs have also improved, so perhaps the differences are more to do with the studio production tools than with the format…
However, I still stand by my observation: it is amazing just how good the sound was from a bit of rock being dragged along the fragile grooves in a disc of dodgy plastic.
> as demonstrated by Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Welcome to the Pleasuredome
The first time I heard a CD it was via some very nice Sennheiser headphones in a quietroom. I was just handed the 'phones and told "listen to this" - Suzanne Vega singing "Luka". Unaccompanied, nothing but her voice, no hum, no hiss, no crackles. Sheer magic. I went home & bought a CD player...
Yes, she still tours but I am not in Europe.... (wish I was for the next couple of years).
But, I know she IS touring in America but she is ONLY DOING THE WEST COAST....!!!!! Dang it all to hell...... I left the west coast years ago to come to the east coast.
And I DEFINITELY enjoyed concerts in Washington state and California (San Fran and Santa Barbara and L.A. areas). But, folks out there will just have to be forced into enjoying for me as well...
I get my CDs from charity shops (goodwill) and rip them with EAC (Exact Audio Copy) where it's only necessary to add or correct the metadata.
Saving in flac format and making sure the metadata is recognised by WMP, VLC, etc.
If it doesn't find the CD cover image use Discogs or scan it myself.
I too buy my CDs from charity shops. Our local town has half a dozen charity shops and I can usually find something interesting for £1 - £1.50.
As my Volvo doesn't have a CD player I have to rip the CDs down to a USB stick.
Been using Asunder on Linux Mint to rip them.
Rather pleasingly, my 2009 Lexus (starting to rust underneath, bugger), has a competent 6-disc cd player in the dash, but the software randomly decides whether to display any metadata, let alone correct data. It also has a cassette player, remember those? The trouble is, I searched the house and loft top to bottom to find an old cassette tape to try. Nothing. As the old joke goes, the only one I found was by a band called "Tape cleaner", and they were absolute rubbish.
> The trouble is, I searched the house and loft top to bottom to find an old cassette tape to try.
Visit your neighbourhood record (sic!) store!
Modern acts doing small pressings (<5000 LPs) often seem to release MCs as well. This is what I gather from stores I visit (online & offline). But upon looking into it more, you can also find best-selling releases on MC. An example
WMP is useless. From time to time, I have tried it and I cannot remember a time when it did not return a message saying it did not have the necessary codec to play whatever media I had asked it to play.
VLC is my go to for videos, and there are so many audio players, I don't have a favourite. But WMP would not be missed if it disappeared entirely. Possibly next to GameBar, it's the least used app on a Windows machine.
Indeed. And it even has a .exe ready for the Windowers (https://github.com/metabrainz/picard/releases/latest)
Most of my CDs are Japanese or Korean and it has never worked for any of them. I can't actually remember it ever working for any Western CDs either.
And I never stopped buying CDs. They have asset value, especially Kpop and Kdrama OSTs in 'as new' condition. Check out the resale prices on ebay.
If you don't want to lose your music to contract failures or cancel culture, and you want the band to get more of the revenue, buy CDs. Korean ones often come with extra goodies, whilst Japanese ones may come with DVDs or BDs of concert or other footage.
The problem with Japanese CDs is how xenophobic some of the companies are.
The Initial D anime aired in Malaysia. However Avex vetos the export of the soundtrack (mostly rave/Eurodance tracks by West European performers like Dave Rodgers). Johnny and Associates' bands is even worse. Heck even some Sony Music/Columbia CDs are blocked from export.
....they are just about to release MediaPilot365 with extra AI. It will get 53% of the tracks right, apologise when it plays a track from a completely different CD 13 times over and consume the power of a small nation state. All for £/$199 per year*
*Price based on first 30 day period. Increases of 50% per month after initial 30 day trial period. You can opt out at any time by following this link [404 Page Note Found]
> Also remember that when you stop paying all your previously tagged music will now 404 and not play.
Didn't that happen to Apple Music users sometimes back? Suddenly their ripped music was replaced with DRMed copies that would no longer play once they terminated their Apple Music subscription?
Which music CD had the following song times? 14 tracks with lengths: 16s, 4:41, 7:35, 3:36, 7:36, 5:36, 4:14, 6:08, 6:52, 3:47, 4:12, 4:49, 5:24, and 4:19 in this order?
Gemini: Coldplay - A rush of blood to the head
wrong.
Gemini: Dream Theater - A Dramatic Turn of Events
wrong.
Gemini: Dream Theater - Octavium
wrong.
Gemini: Porcupine Tree - Anesthetize
wrong.
eff-it.
That's why gnudb (the freedb successor, run by one person with help from people who send in data...) doesn't use track length in seconds, but the more accurate track start time in audio frames, along with the length of the album. Well, and also, "why you shouldn't use AI for things it clearly wasn't designed for."
Keep it Unreal … tjones beat me to it. Just posting to hang that at the right position, and to share a reference.
Don’t rely on LLMs if every character of your question is important…
No WMP for me. I rip and store my CDs with a Brennan B2 (made in England, I think). It’s an awesome machine that can do several things (they might have a newer version now). I have reasonable success getting the info and cover with 3rd party sites and the rest I type in by hand.
Maybe the legacy player would no longer be necessary if Microsoft would fix the modern one. The new one is a joke. It takes forever to import music into it and then hangs. I find it amazing that a company like Microsoft can't implement something as simple as take a list of files and read the metadata and load it into a database. I have around 20,000 files. It can't even handle that many. They couldn't just load the data into an SQLite database or something? It's pathetic. Clearly, they don't care at all about applications such as these. it doesn't make them any money. So, they don't care. They would rather try to jam AI down everyone's throats even though most people don't want it.
Apple's iTunes recognizes the CDs because iTunes still has digital copies of those albums to serve up, so it has the information. Microsoft never ran a streaming service, so they have no use for the data except to feed their player. Hence no profit motive, much less a staggeringly high one like Apple has.
Ripping CD's - Exact Audio Copy (EAC)
Album Covers - Album Art Downloader (AAD)
Updating metadata - Mp3Tag
EAC will rip any Cd into wav then convert to flac or mp3 as required.
AAD finds album artwork from 30+ suppliers and has never let me down.
Mp3Tag adds artwork to intividual tracks. Works with flac.
I have an old Terratec phono/preamp which sits between my record deck and PC and rips LP's to flac.
Over the last 10+ years I've converted all my CD's and LP's to flac and saved them on my NAS where they can be streamed to my hi-fi, tv, pc or copied to a usb stick for playing in the car.
Start here - https://www.techhive.com/article/582838/how-to-manage-your-digital-music-library.html
>Some 90s cheese that was successfully ripped (for personal use, of course) decades ago?
I personally wouldn't have admitted to committing copyright infringement like that.
(That's right, the current copyright laws are so insane and brain damaged in the USA and the UK, that you're not even allowed to make a backup or rip of a song without permission to do so - although it is extremely unlike you'll be prosecuted if you don't distribute that copy).
In the US under the Fair Use Doctrine, you are legally allowed to rip your purchased CDs and Video disc. But thanks to bribes paid for laws delivered, it is illegal to break encryption to rip your purchases. This encryption limitation does not effect CD ripping, only most DVD/BRays. As I recall in the UK, Fair Use laws went back and forth a few times depending on who MPAA/RIAA were bribing and who was in power. I lost track of where UK Fair Use ended up. One commonality is, every time consumer rights laws come up for review, the entertainment industry bribes politicians in an attempt to disallow any consumer rights. A telling quote comes from MPAA's Jack Valenti, "If you buy a DVD you have a copy. If you want a backup copy you buy another one".
Unrelated to fair use, a suggested app to cure any privacy violating WMP library blues
An extremely fast and powerful library manager I recommend is the audio player foobar2000. I've been through them all and even have three Slimserver Classics. But 99% of the time, I listen to foobar2000 through headphones. To derive full enjoyment from any media player, your library should be properly tagged so you can search it, along with the correct release folder.jpg art in all dirs for visual enhancement. So that disqualifies any Microsoft product which have always been incapable of anything other than reporting your activities.
foobar2000 takes a few minutes to learn to use, but any music player will do fine if you only want to invest a few minutes. But once you take the required time and peel back the layers to learn it well, foobar is "Winamp level" flexible, and the highest quality player available (24bit, 5.1, 24/88 iso, DSD, etc). Out of the box it plays all codecs/all formats and respects your privacy. Last I checked a few years ago, set it to not check for updates and it doesn't touch the internet unless you ask it to do so. PS: If you already use foobar for a few decades and haven't checked it out, take 10 minutes learning to configure & use the included ReFacets plugin.
https://www.foobar2000.org/
https://www.mp3tag.de/en/
Or course, vlc for video: https://www.videolan.org/
"Fair use" is a defense - making the copy is still not allowed, but technically you can avoid prosecution if the copy is deemed "fair".
The UK doesn't have "fair use" - it has "fair dealing", which is a far weaker.
It seems it was previously made legal to rip CDs and movies in the UK, but then it was made illegal again; https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-33566933
Laws that forbid the breaking or working around of digital handcuffs have the separate goal of allowing the copyright holder to write their own copyright laws, so that standard and also legal activities can be forbidden in practice (i.e. one scheme that was intended to be implemented was to have a camera on the player, that would determine how many people are in the room and therefore allow for charging per head for a movie - maybe later that could be implemented in a different way).
It is crucial that foobar2000 is not be used by anyone, as it is proprietary software.
I would like to see proof that foobar2000 never reports the users activities (seeing that a few years ago that it doesn't seem to connect to the internet when you run wireguard or whatever on the same computer for a few minutes is not proof - there are many sneaky things you can do with software - the only proof that will do is complete corresponding source-code (as you can then check the internet connection codepaths), but you're not allowed to have that).
VLC works fine for playing audio, same as mpv, same as Emacs MPC & Emacs EMMS and those at least respect the users freedom and certainly do not spy on the user.
It seems it was previously made legal to rip CDs and movies in the UK, but then it was made illegal again; https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-33566933.
Ah, after my time. Thanks for the info.
Though we're still in the realm of lawful/unlawful rather than illegal/illegal no?
Read my comment with a more careful mind.
When discussing law it is important to make distinctions, such as which country the laws apply to.
So I'll write it again in a different way,
In the US, it is 100% legal for an owner of an unencrypted disk to,
1. make an exact digital back up of that disc, in both physical and digital formats
2. rip the tracks from that disc
Like I stated about the UK, fair use varied over time and I lost track of the laws due to time constraints. Thus, made no other statements about UK law.
You state,
> "It is crucial that foobar2000 is not be used by anyone, as it is proprietary software." <
You probably don't understand the silliness of your comment so I'll break it down for you. You state
"Don't use foobar2000 BECAUSE it is proprietary software"
But disregard the fact it is running on Windows, proprietary software and known spyware. Furthermore, you infer you vetted every bit of software on your machine by accurately vetting *reproducible* source code. You have not. You infer you have examined the proprietary software in the silicon chips of every device's firmware in your box. You have not. Thus, "It is crucial that your machine is not be used by anyone". That's how logic works, so your stated position would result in no one ever using a computer again.
So lets get back to practicality, running a box requires trust because all software cannot be vetted by every user. Thus to techies, trust requires knowledge and security procedures, along with a philosophy such as, trust but block. Trust but lock down. Trust but monitor.
foobar2000 is among the apps I completely trust. I also trust all apps from nirsoft. Same with mp3tag, same with VLC, same with Debian and every bit of software I run on every box. I once trusted systernals, until Mark was completely assimilated into the dark side. So when an app that is once trusted breaches that trust, you stop using it. But if an app never breaches trust, I consider it safe. I have over 40 copies of foobar2000 running on several boxes (some machines have eight copies, some five, some two). Not once have I ever seen foobar2000 misbehave in any way.
>In the US, it is 100% legal for an owner of an unencrypted disk to,
>1. make an exact digital back up of that disc, in both physical and digital formats
It is still 100% illegal in the USA to make any backup of an unencrypted music CD, as there is no exception granted in US copyright law that gives permission to do so; https://www.copyright.gov/title17/title17.pdf although you are extremely unlikely to be prosecuted for doing so and a "fair use" defense is likely to be successful.
The only thing that you are allowed to backup are computer programs; https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-digital.html; "There is no other provision in the Copyright Act that specifically authorizes the making of backup copies of works other than computer programs even if those works are distributed as digital copies."
>But disregard the fact it is running on Windows, proprietary software and known spyware.
I don't need to point out the obvious every single time I point out that you shouldn't run additional proprietary software - it would also be possible to make the mistake of running foobar2000 in WINE.
>Furthermore, you infer you vetted every bit of software on your machine by accurately vetting *reproducible* source code.
If it's not free software (and therefore has complete corresponding source code available), I won't install it on my machines.
The binary output from free software source code being compiled not being exactly reproducible doesn't make such software proprietary - after all, you'll get a different binary hash if you use a different version of GCC and some binaries have the current date inserted.
>You infer you have examined the proprietary software in the silicon chips of every device's firmware in your box.
I didn't install it and I have examined all of such software in my computers.
On my ThinkPads, I have replaced the BIOS which had malicious features with GNUboot.
My goal is to replace every remaining piece of software, but upon examining most, there is not cause for much concern, as there can't be a remote backdoor in such that allows the vendor to remotely change it and such software doesn't have DMA either.
>That's how logic works, so your stated position would result in no one ever using a computer again.
Maybe that would be fine - but it is perfectly feasible and achievable for a computer to work without any proprietary software - and there are already a limited amount of microprocessors do exist that run all free software (for example Arduino's prior to the acquisition by Qualcomm).
>foobar2000 is among the apps I completely trust. I also trust all apps from nirsoft. Same with mp3tag
It's insanity to trust software that can go and connect to the internet, that you're not allowed to see the source code of, unless you have at least thoroughly inspected the object code.
Inspecting object code thoroughly is feasible for a small boring program that takes touchpad inputs, but it is not really possible for a several MiB binary.
>same with Debian
It is a mistake to trust Debian, considering how they added a malicious feature to the installer than automatically installs proprietary software without even asking the user.
Which is as pointless as hard to understand. CDs are actually containing the same data as digital releases. They even are digital releases - on a physical medium. A request to a music database should return the same results for a physical CD or a "digital release", so MS must have deliberately removed lookups for physical media.
I use mp3tag to get all of the metadata for my CD rips, because I still acquire music in physical format, same as I did bluray movies and tv shows.
Just the other day, I picked up 5 bluray movies from a charity shop for £8...
My optical drive in my server however... is getting flaky, and I need to source one with a firmware that won't block you from ripping the movies/tv shows from the discs... The old pioneer one I';ve got must be 12-13yrs old now... It's lasted me well.
Of course... if I can't rip my own media from my own physical copies... how else can I be expected to add the movies I already own to my personal mediaserver.
Why don't we use Copilot to find what album it is.
Oh this song is "give me miniature falsehoods containing fructose" by Fleetwood AppleComputers.
"oh fuck this dark magenta precipitation thats burning my eyes" - by the heir to the throne.
"I refuse to turn you into law enforcement" - by rick astley.
The promise of streaming services having everything you could ever want for cheap forever sure didn't last long. I remember silently judging all the people dumping their CD's and DVDs off at thrift stores and bragging about how much storage space they recovered. I eventually started streaming, and I downsized my collection of stuff I hadn't listened to in 10+ years and albums I never cared all that much for originally, but I'd purchased them for $15-20, so I kept them on principle. And I'm glad I did because streaming prices keep going up while stream quality goes down. I can't even listen to Spotify unless it's the Lossless plan and even then it doesn't sound quite right. Something is just off. I'm glad I kept my favorites and treasures.
I am sorry.
I have the Media player on my pc as an alternative when I want to use it. I've not used it for quite a while.
But - just pulled it up and it is showing me all that info for the tracks.... I'm on Win 11 Pro and the latest media player v.12.0.26100.7309
I would share a screen shot of it, but...... it appears THIS site does not allow us to share it here (unless someone knows a way, tell me).
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