MP3 Viewer

Anyone knows what is TLEN and NCON as keys of comparison in the MP3 viewer plugin?
Thanks

[Erik]

TLEN is the length of the song. I'm not sure what NCON is because it is not declared in the ID3v2 documentation. APIC is a picture stored in the mp3 file. The MP3 Viewer doesn't understand these data types and only reports their size. For example, APIC reports the size of the picture.

This is a good viewer to have. Is there any chance more development could be done on it? It's a great beginning, but I'd love to see it fleshed out a bit, even possibly as a shareware item if need be.

I've got a few initial feature ideas to make it more widely useful. Some are fairly ambitious, but please do consider 'em:<ul type="square"> Control to trigger playback for both sides simultaneously (possibly after one or both sides are manually synchronized) Ability to ignore tags and only compare content Ability to synchronize tags Bidirectional tag copy for empty fields Playback speed control (some music files have minor speed variations based on the original playback) Ability to split left-side playback to the left audio channel and the right-side playback to the right channel[/list]Those are my most-needed features -- I'm sure people will be able to think of a lot more, but if just those are implemented it would become an extremely powerful tool.

Thanks for reading! :)

[Erik]

Thanks for the suggestions. I will add them to the wishlist.

FYI, the MP3 Viewer does a binary comparison of the song's content. Make all other keys unimportant to ignore tags.

[gadgeteria]

I will add them to the wishlist.

Thanks. :D



FYI, the MP3 Viewer does a binary comparison of the song's content. Make all other keys unimportant to ignore tags.

Cool! I appreciate the tip -- I hadn't noticed that the viewer had its own rules definition.

BTW, you probably realize that binary comparisons of audio and images are less useful than with most files -- fairly sizeable variations aren't even perceptible in the rendered output. They can only be compared intelligently using fuzzy logic and Tolerant Pattern Matching. That's why I mentioned willingness to pay for the plugin, because it's probably going to take some effort -- it probably goes above and beyond the basic "charter" for Beyond Compare. :) The foundation has been laid with tag comparison in the MP3 plugin, but it doesn't seem to compare bitrate, duration, channels and so on.

The image comparison plugin is outstanding in its ability to visually depict differences, but it would also benefit from the fuzzy logic and pattern matching ability. Let me point you to a program called [d'peg] (http://www.gotdupes.com/) which seems like a good product for comparison.

[gadgeteria]

:confused: The MP3 plugin's playback controls seem to have been broken somehow with the Windows Media Player 10 upgrade. Or maybe it's XP SP2, I'm not 100% sure.

Has Scooter had a chance to test that combination yet?

[Chris]

I've tried the mp3 plug-in on a system running SP2 with windows media player 10 installed and I haven't had problems with it.

Have you installed any other media codecs or media players lately?

Do you have problems with playback in other programs?

Hi, Chris --

Have you installed any other media codecs or media players lately?

Do you have problems with playback in other programs?


Nope, that's the only change to my system in quite some time. It's not a playback problem -- the controls themselves are disabled. WinAmp, Media Player 10, RealPlayer and QuickTime all are unaffected.

[gadgeteria]

Sorry about that -- forgot to log in for the previous post. :)

[Chris]

I'm not sure what might be causing the problem.
It might be a corrupted setting in your plug-in, or a problem with the plug-in file.

Try deleting the MP3 Viewer settings registry key to make the plug-in recreate it with default settings.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Scooter Software\Beyond Compare\Plugins\MP3 Viewer

Another thing to try is to download and install a fresh copy of the mp3 plug-in.

[gadgeteria]

Try deleting the MP3 Viewer settings registry key to make the plug-in recreate it with default settings.

Good idea -- I'll give it a shot. I'll try the reinstall as well and report back. Thanks!

[gadgeteria]

Nope. No change. Everything else works, but the playback controls are disabled.

[Chris]

Are the controls disabled with all mp3 files, or only specific mp3 files? It is possible for an mp3 file to have valid mp3 tags, but invalid audio. In that case the viewer will display the tags but disable the playback controls.

Are the files on a local disk?

[gadgeteria]

Are the controls disabled with all mp3 files

Yes, all. The files play properly in the mainstream players listed previously.


Are the files on a local disk?

Yup, internal IDE Maxtor HDD. There isn't anything unusual about the files themselves -- the problem extends to files I've compared previously (without incident) as well.

Thanks for helping brainstorm this thing, though!

[Chris]

I'm running low on ideas as to why it isn't working. BC's mp3 plug-in uses a Delphi TMediaPlayer component to play mp3s, and it is just a wrapper around Microsoft's Media Control Interface that is built into Window's media playing library. My best guess is that one of those dlls is messed up some how. It might help to replace one of them.

You can see what dlls the mp3 plug-in has loaded using Process Explorer from www.sysinternals.com. (http://www.sysinternals.com.)

On my own system the dlls loaded by the mp3 view plugin that look like they're related to multimedia are:

dsound.dll DirectSound Microsoft Corporation 5.03.2600.2180
l3codecx.ax MPEG Layer-3 Audio Decoder Fraunhofer Institut Integrierte Schaltungen IIS 1.05.0000.0050
mciqtz32.dll 6.05.2600.2180
midimap.dll Microsoft MIDI Mapper Microsoft Corporation 5.01.2600.2180
msacm32.dll Microsoft ACM Audio Filter Microsoft Corporation 5.01.2600.2180
msacm32.drv Microsoft Sound Mapper Microsoft Corporation 5.01.2600.0000
quartz.dll 6.05.2600.2180
wdmaud.drv WDM Audio driver mapper Microsoft Corporation 5.01.2600.2180
winmm.dll MCI API DLL Microsoft Corporation 5.01.2600.2180

[gadgeteria]

Ah hah! I accidentally figured out what the heck was going on, Chris. Your description of items being loaded prompted me to experiment, and it turns out I had temporarily disabled a Shell Extension exported from "%windir%\system32\wmpshell.dll" for a project I was working on. The one that affected the BC plugin was named "WMP Play As Playlist Launcher", a context menu handler.

FWIW, there're two others that I know of that wmpshell.dll provides, "WMP Add To Playlist Launcher" and "WMP Burn Audio CD Launcher", all listed as Context Menu extensions. I have no idea what the playback support has to do with "play as playlist", but that's the one!

BTW, I've been using SysInternals software for years -- it's some of the most useful I've ever found for getting at the "innards" of the way the OS works on a particular machine. Most of their stuff is freeware and is better than lots of commercial software. What led me to this one was a cool freeware offering from NirSoft (http://www.nirsoft.net/) called ShellExView 1.01. :D

Thanks again for helping try to figure out what was up!

[gadgeteria]

More for the idea list: I really miss being able to see the track length, bit rate, and sample rate -- important quality-related statistics that're reported by many MP3 utils I've used. Another biggie is the channel format (stereo, joint stereo, dual channel, or even the new 5.1 surround standard from Fraunhofer IIS).

[Chris]

Thank you for the suggestion, I'll add it to our wish list for the Mp3 viewer.

[gadgeteria]

Thanks, Chris!

Any idea yet when the updated MP3 plugin (bit rate, length etc etc) will be available?

[Chris]

We haven't scheduled the next release of the MP3 Viewer yet.

[nessi]

More for the idea list: [...]


I miss to be able to choose whether to compare ID3v1 or ID3v2 Tags.
And an "ignore case" switch for the tags.

[Chris]

Thank you for the suggestions. I'll add these to our wish list.

[gadgeteria]

We haven't scheduled the next release of the MP3 Viewer yet.


Is there any availability of some sort of roadmap? I sure would like to see the Viewer enhanced... :)

[Chris]

We don't have a detailed roadmap for the Mp3 Viewer right now.

I think there are plans to update the plug-ins when we release version 3, but I don't think we have specific plans for them in the near future.

We're a pretty small company (5 full time employees), and right now we're focusing our development resources on BC version 3 rather than the plug-ins.

[gadgeteria]

Sounds reasonable, Chris. Thanks!

[gadgeteria]

:confused: The MP3 plugin's playback controls seem to have been broken somehow

This seems to be an ongoing issue, on my machine anyway (XP Pro SP2). The playback controls remain permanently dimmed for any/all MP3 files, and this has been the state for most of the past couple of years or so. If I install/uninstall other audio packages, they "just work", even packages using the default Windows player/codec as with Compare.

I thought I'd hit on a solution in 2004, but it proved to only work in the short term. Is there anything you or I can do to troubleshoot this issue? I've already tried all the suggestions earlier in this topic. I sure would love to be able to use the side-by-side comparison. :)

[Chris]

Sorry, I still don't know why the controls are disabling. In the past it worked fine with Windows Media Player 10, and I've since upgraded to Windows Media Player 11 and it is still working fine on my own system.

[gadgeteria]

Thanks, Chris. (I'm still using WMP 10, but I had the same issue with v9.)

Could you please ask whoever wrote the code what has to happen for the controls to be enabled? This is nuts!

[Chris]

The playback part of the MP3 Viewer uses a third party component, so I don't think anyone on our staff knows a great deal about it. I'll try to find some time in my schedule to look into this a little deeper.

[gadgeteria]

The playback part of the MP3 Viewer uses third party component


Aha, I can see where that would complicate things.



I'll try to find some time in my schedule to look into this a little deeper.


Thanks very much -- I would definitely be grateful.

[gadgeteria]

I'll try to find some time in my schedule to look into this a little deeper.

Bump

[Chris]

Gadget,

Thanks for the reminder. I'll try to get some time in to look at this.

[gadgeteria]

Thanks, Chris -- but that doesn't sound very promising.