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.

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] which seems like a good product for comparison.

[gadgeteria]

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.