MP3 Viewer

[gadgeteria]

Re: MP3 Viewer

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 called ShellExView 1.01.

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

[gadgeteria]

Re: MP3 Viewer

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]

Re: MP3 Viewer

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

[gadgeteria]

Re: MP3 Viewer

Thanks, Chris!

[Guest]

Re: MP3 Viewer

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

[Chris]

Re: MP3 Viewer

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

[nessi]

Re: MP3 Viewer

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]

Re: MP3 Viewer

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

[gadgeteria]

Re: MP3 Viewer

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]

Re: MP3 Viewer

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]

Re: MP3 Viewer

Sounds reasonable, Chris. Thanks!

[gadgeteria]

Re: MP3 Viewer

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]

Re: MP3 Viewer

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]

Re: MP3 Viewer

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]

Re: MP3 Viewer

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.