Error: Reading WMA (Lossless) Tags and Header Info

[jtb3]

Hi,
1) There is a very repeatable bug in the reading of WMA Tags (especially WMA9 Lossless): After importing a folder of WMAs into MM, Track #s are lost and the "year" information is displayed instead. This happens 97% of the time with WMA9 (Lossless) and 20% of the time with regular WMA files.

2) The Header Information for "Sample Rate" and "Channels" is also missing from WMA files (100% of the time) and also with M4A files. This is usefull information.

I tested the above senarios with WM Player 9 and J.River Media Center 10 and they work fine. I'm using the latest RC3 Version 2.2.1.755 (on Win XP Pro)

Thanks in advance for fixing these! - JT

Note: There is steady rise in the use of lossless codecs. I (and many others) are ripping CDs into WMA lossless to retain audio quality. The above problems could be a big issues for many of your potential purchasers.

[Peke]

For Now MM Do not support WMA9 Files You can try to use Winamp Plugin instead of MM's default but no garantie.

[jiri]

1) I reviewed the functionality and don't see any problem there. Can you consistently reproduce it for some set of tracks, i.e. if you delete such tracks from library and scan them again, do you get the same result? Or is it rather random?

2) These two fields aren't directly accessible in WMA files, they can be read just after playback starts, therefore MM doesn't scan them. I hope we'll find some improvement in this field.
M4A isn't directly supported by MediaMonkey, I guess you installed an input plug-in for this format. However, until a format plug-in with full support of the format is released you cannot tag or read advanced information about such files.

Jiri

[jtb3]

Thanks for looking into this Jiri,
Yes, it is consistent. I removed all nullsoft plugins that I added and then removed and rescanned the tracks.

- The wma lossless files still incorrectly showed the 'year' values in the Track# field (out of 757 scanned files, only 23 had correct track#s)
(If it's any help, I use "Tag&Rrename" and "MediaCenter10" to do many of my wma tag updates) Also, the winamp "file info" shows all of the tag attributes correctly - though the ORDER of the tag attributes can be different from one file to the next - Perhaps this is a place to look)

- As you predicted, the m4a files no longer showed up.

As far as the 'Sample Rate' and 'channels' info - it would be great if you could read the necessary data to get this info. Many other programs do this very quickly (i.e.Tag&Rename).

[jiri]

Could you e-mail me one short WMA file with the described problem? That should be the easiest way how to find out what's going on.

Thanks,
Jiri

[jtb3]

Sure thing. It's in the mail! - JT

[jiri]

Thanks for the file, there were two problems:
- track#s were supposed to be integers, while they are usually stored as strings
- genres not in Library yet weren't properly imported.

Both issues are fixed and will be ok in the final 2.2 release.

Jiri.

[Daveis]

What about converting files formats to WMA9 lossless?
In particular, I no longer want to use the APE format
as no pocket device will probably ever support APE.
I use a pocket pc and would like to be able to download
files to it occasicnally. I see that as of version 2.2 MM doesnt
support converting of files to WMA lossless. I agree with the
first post... with hard drive prices coming down there's no
reason to use lossy on anything other than pocket devices.

[Lowlander]

I assume your running windows on a pocket PC?

You might want to check this out: http://www.musicex.com/press/press19.html. My understanding is that it runs on Windows CE. It's got some nice ratings from CNet and looks amazingly similar to MM????