WMP Tag Plus - MPEG4, Vorbis and FLAC metadata support for WMP Options

[schottjy]

Thanks, I'm going to do a clean install of everything tonight (since I have attempted some registry hackery and used a mix/match of codecs trying to get this going). I'll install this test version and report back to you.

Thanks!

Hrm. Spoke too soon earlier. 2 of 3 extenders working. Let me dig some more.

This post has been edited by schottjy: May 2 2012, 00:20

[schottjy]

Thanks, I'm going to do a clean install of everything tonight (since I have attempted some registry hackery and used a mix/match of codecs trying to get this going). I'll install this test version and report back to you.

Thanks!

Hrm. Spoke too soon earlier. 2 of 3 extenders working. Let me dig some more.

Removing and re-adding the non-functional extender seems seems to have fixed the issue I was seeing. All the 360s extenders can see the metadata.
The error messages in the event logs are completely gone as well. I plan to do a clean install this weekend and will report back if I see any other issues.

Thanks!

[Tim De Baets]

Good to hear that both issues are now resolved

[andrewfg]

I frequently use my WMP to "play to" DLNA devices. Previously I have been able to play native and non-native files from WMP's library on my DLNA-supporting media renderers by using the Play To feature. You select the device and WMP serves the file, and you have the music through your stereo.

At some point this stopped working, and I've now managed to fix it. However, now I can only serve the native files in this way (i.e. MP3 and M4A work), but whenever I try to serve a FLAC file I get an error in the Play To box:

Hi Wigster, as you know, we have been discussing this over on another forum too...

There are two types of codec architecture namely DirectShow and Media Foundation. The former is the old way of doing it, and the latter the new way.

Windows Media Player 12 uses Media Foundation for all its own core codecs, and it can be extended to support other media types by means of additional third party codecs. As far as I can tell, WMP12 can use both DirectShow codecs and Media Foundation codecs for extending its "Play" (to the local PC speakers) command, however it seems that it requires a Media Foundation codec for extending its UPnP/DLNA "Play To" (a remote player) command.

So, in order to support both "Play" and "Play To" of FLAC files, you will need to uninstall the DirectShow codec associated with FLAC files, and instead install a Media Foundation codec for playing FLAC. There seems to be only one Media Foundation codec for FLAC in existence. I have tested it and it works fine. You can get it here http://sourceforge.net/projects/mfflac/files/

And if you install Tim's latest WMP Tag Plus v2.0 beta, that works perfectly alongside this codec.

[wigster]

And if you install Tim's latest WMP Tag Plus v2.0 beta, that works perfectly alongside this codec.

Hi,

So I have managed to get DLNA streaming of FLACs working, as per AndrewFG's instructions. There seems to be a niggle, which may be related to WMP Tag Plus (2 beta 2): when you select a FLAC file to stream to a DLNA device, a playlist appears in a "Play To" windows. Next to each track is the album art. However, it doesn't seem to appear for all the FLAC files. I wanted to say that it appears for none, but in fact I have managed to find at least one which seems to work.

I am providing links to two FLAC files, which have album art embedded and one of which displays the album art in the Play To window OK, while the other one doesn't Hope this is something replicable.

The healthy one:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/15242944/Aitcho%20...%20Plastic.flac

and the one not displaying album art:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/15242944/07%202562...20Hardcore.flac

If I look at the hidden files, the second folder contains the AlbumArt_{wgwenflwejfwjfwfjwe} files, while the one that works---does not. They both have the AlbumArtSmall.jpg and Folder.jpg. I did wipe the libraries completely after installing WMP Tag+ 2, but maybe the broken album I had previously identified by looking for it through WMP's tagger and now there is some conflict?

[andrewfg]

I am providing links to two FLAC files, which have album art embedded and one of which displays the album art in the Play To window OK, while the other one doesn't Hope this is something replicable.

Yes I can replicate this. And it is certainly an issue on the WMP side of things rather than on the UPnP player side, because in fact in both cases WMP is serving an art image. But in one of your tracks the image is the real cover art of the track, whereas in the other case, it is WMP's "music note" place holder image.

I am using WMP Tag Plus 2.0 beta 2

[Tim De Baets]

I am providing links to two FLAC files, which have album art embedded and one of which displays the album art in the Play To window OK, while the other one doesn't Hope this is something replicable.

I can confirm that both the FLAC files you linked contain correctly embedded album art and that the album art gets read by WMP Tag Plus.

Do both FLAC files show album art in WMP's library, and in Now Playing mode when playing them with the Album art visualization set?

Perhaps removing the FLAC file not displaying album art from the library and then re-adding it will help?

[andrewfg]

Do both FLAC files show album art in WMP's library, and in Now Playing mode when playing them with the Album art visualization set?

Yes, both the tracks display their cover art correctly in WMP itself. And when WMP sends a UPnP/DLNA SetAvTransportUri() command to play a track to a remote media player, in both cases the command includes all of the respective track's meta data, and also an albumArtURI where the cover art can be retrieved from.

The "only" odd thing is that when the remote player does an HTTP GET for the albumArtURI, in one case WMP returns the proper cover art image, and in the other case it returns the WMP default "music note" image. This indicates that WMP12 has difficulty in loading/rendering/serving the image via HTTP, and that it therefore defaults back to the "music note" image.

Both images are JPEGs so perhaps the bad one has non conform JPEG header data in it so that WMP cannot determine the proper mime type, image width, height or depth. Another problem could be that the WMP server has to resize the image (to size JPEG_SM), and perhaps the bad image lacks some clues or headers for this resizing process. In either case, it could be that 1) the actual image in the tag data is bad, or 2) the WMP Tag Plus image extractor is munging the image in some way...

Edit: to be precise, when I speak of the "Windows Media Player UPnP/DLNA server" this means the "Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service" which is a Windows Service Application that does the actual serving of media to remote players (among other things). When a meta data plugin such as WMP Tag Plus scans a music track, it adds the respective meta data and cover art images to the WMP database. And when WMP NSS serves a cover art image, it retrieves that from the WMP database.

Perhaps removing the FLAC file not displaying album art from the library and then re-adding it will help?

No this did not help.

This post has been edited by andrewfg: May 7 2012, 15:41

[andrewfg]

Perhaps removing the FLAC file not displaying album art from the library and then re-adding it will help?

I also tried modifying the tags of the track "House of Plastic" using Mp3Tag; I deleted the cover art and saved the track, deleted and reloaded WMPs library, added the cover image back and saved the track again, and deleted and reloaded WMPs library once more. And still the cover art is not displayed in the UPnP renderer.

Edit: I even tried converting the file from FLAC to WAV and then converting the WAV back to FLAC again. And still the cover art is not displayed in the UPnP renderer.

The only thing "odd" about this track is that it is sampled at 44100 Hz, 2 channel, 24 bit. I wonder if this makes a difference? (I did not have any tool handy to try resampling it down to 16 bit).

=> Very interesting....

This post has been edited by andrewfg: May 7 2012, 18:55

[Tim De Baets]

The "only" odd thing is that when the remote player does an HTTP GET for the albumArtURI, in one case WMP returns the proper cover art image, and in the other case it returns the WMP default "music note" image. This indicates that WMP12 has difficulty in loading/rendering/serving the image via HTTP, and that it therefore defaults back to the "music note" image.

Wait, this is on the remote player, while wigster is referring to the Play To window which I believe is still on the local PC. I just want to make sure that we're talking about the same issue here.

Could you please post both these URIs? Perhaps they contain some clues on where the WMP Network Sharing Service tries to get the album art from.

Both images are JPEGs so perhaps the bad one has non conform JPEG header data in it so that WMP cannot determine the proper mime type, image width, height or depth. Another problem could be that the WMP server has to resize the image (to size JPEG_SM), and perhaps the bad image lacks some clues or headers for this resizing process. In either case, it could be that 1) the actual image in the tag data is bad, or 2) the WMP Tag Plus image extractor is munging the image in some way...

The only difference I'm seeing is that the not functioning JPEG is 700x700 while the one that does show is 500x500, so it could be related to the dimensions. 1) and 2) are very unlikely as the album art gets correctly displayed in WMP.

The only thing "odd" about this track is that it is sampled at 44100 Hz, 2 channel, 24 bit. I wonder if this makes a difference? (I did not have any tool handy to try resampling it down to 16 bit).

Also very unlikely that the format of the audio data would cause album art issues. FLAC metadata blocks are separated from audio frames.

If you open the FLAC file that doesn't work in Mp3tag and go to Extended Tags, do you see any WM/WMCOLLECTIONGROUPID, WM/WMCOLLECTIONID and/or WM/WMCONTENTID tags? Does it help if you remove the file from the library, delete those tags, and then re-add the file again?

[andrewfg]

Wait, this is on the remote player, while wigster is referring to the Play To window which I believe is still on the local PC. I just want to make sure that we're talking about the same issue here.

We are talking about the same issue. Just two aspects thereof. On the local machine, the WMP NSS "Player App" displays the default music note image. And the same music note image is served to the physical player when does its HTTP GET on WMP NSS.

Could you please post both these URIs? Perhaps they contain some clues on where the WMP Network Sharing Service tries to get the album art from.

I am on the road at the moment so I can't tell you the exact URI until I get back next week. But it is a URI on a Windows O/S internal server that responds with an HTTP SERVER header having something like "Windows Media Network Streaming Service" in it....

The only difference I'm seeing is that the not functioning JPEG is 700x700 while the one that does show is 500x500, so it could be related to the dimensions. 1) and 2) are very unlikely as the album art gets correctly displayed in WMP.

I don't think so. I actually tried in Mp3Tag to export the image to a JPEG, deleted it from the track tag, then used Paint to manipulate the image and save as a PNG, and then reimport that into the track tags again. Still the same behaviour.

Also very unlikely that the format of the audio data would cause album art issues. FLAC metadata blocks are separated from audio frames.

Indeed unlikely. But frankly I cannot think of anything else that could explain this issue. Wigsters good track had a 700x700 image in a 44100/16/2 file and the bad one has a 500x500 image (or whatever) in a 44100/24/2 track.

If you open the FLAC file that doesn't work in Mp3tag and go to Extended Tags, do you see any WM/WMCOLLECTIONGROUPID, WM/WMCOLLECTIONID and/or WM/WMCONTENTID tags? Does it help if you remove the file from the library, delete those tags, and then re-add the file again?

As mentioned before, I am on the road, so cannot check this until I get back. But this is an interesting line of inquiry. I also did wonder if there might be some trash in the other tags (e.g. invalid characters, invalid tag names, invalid tag wrappers, etc.) that could be causing this upset. I did also wonder if (for example) the track may be one with ID3 tags instead of FLAC tags (say).

[Tim De Baets]

Announcement: WMP Tag Plus 2.0 has gone out of beta and the final version is now available for download.

Changes since the last beta:

• Preliminary support for Windows Media Player 12 on Windows 8.
• WMP Tag Plus doesn't try to show its settings anymore when WMP is running invisibly in the background (fixes 'unauthorized window' errors in event log while using a Windows Media Center Extender).

See the Version History page for a detailed list of what's new and what has been fixed.

[RcK17]

Working fine so far on Windows 8 CP. Album art shows up nicely, as well as APE tags. Thanks!

This post has been edited by RcK17: May 13 2012, 08:00

[andrewfg]

If you open the FLAC file that doesn't work in Mp3tag and go to Extended Tags, do you see any WM/WMCOLLECTIONGROUPID, WM/WMCOLLECTIONID and/or WM/WMCONTENTID tags? Does it help if you remove the file from the library, delete those tags, and then re-add the file again?

No, the file in question does not have these tags in it. And interestingly Wigsters other file (the one that works) does have those tags in it. So I can confirm two ways that these tags are not the cause of the problem.

[andrewfg]

Could you please post both these URIs? Perhaps they contain some clues on where the WMP Network Sharing Service tries to get the album art from.

Here is the good one:

CODE

http://192.168.1.33:10243/WMPNSSv4/813663920/e0VENkY5NjRBLTFBQjAtNDU2NS1BNDRDLTgxMDNFQUIzOTZGNX0uMC40.jpg?albumArt=true,formatID=13

And the bad one:

CODE

http://192.168.1.33:10243/WMPNSSv4/813663920/ezhGRDM4NTRDLTcyQjUtNEVCMS04MTYyLUY4Q0UwNkZCRUUzM30uMC40.jpg?albumArt=true,formatID=13

And here is a trace of an HTTP GET on the bad url...

CODE

GET /WMPNSSv4/813663920/ezhGRDM4NTRDLTcyQjUtNEVCMS04MTYyLUY4Q0UwNkZCRUUzM30uMC40.jpg?albumArt=true,formatID=13 HTTP/1.1
Accept: text/html, application/xhtml+xml, */*
Accept-Language: en-GB
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/5.0)
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Host: 192.168.1.33:10243
Connection: Keep-Alive

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Length: 9075
Content-Type: image/jpeg
Server: Microsoft-HTTPAPI/2.0
Accept-Ranges: bytes
TransferMode.DLNA.ORG: Interactive
Date: Thu, 17 May 2012 12:31:09 GMT

...returns the WMP default "music note" image...

[Tim De Baets]

Thanks for providing the additional info. Unfortunately I don't see any clues in the URIs or the HTTP trace either, as I would have hoped.

I just saw that wigster had reported an error in Event Viewer that was related to such an URI:

When I look into the Event Viewer logs (Windows/System) there is a WMP-related warning there

The Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service cannot process the request for URI 'http://192.168.1.6:10243/WMPNSSv4/2694848959/0_e0Y2OUQyNjYyLTE4MkEtNEVCNC1CQURCLUEzRjc4NjE1QzBENn0uMC40.jpg?albumArt=true' from IP address '192.168.1.6' due to error '0xc00d1906'.

Please check if you are getting the same error or perhaps a different one.

Another thing left to try is to put just the problematic FLAC file together with its album art JPG files (including Folder.jpg) into a separate folder, and check if album art gets displayed for the file then.

[73ChargerFan]

andrewfg,

I'm jumping in - can you add the image from the file that doesn't work, into the one that does? And visa-versa. That might show that it is the jpeg image that is causing the problem.

eac3to can downcovert flac from 24bit to 16bit, command line is:
eac3to input.flac output.flac -down16

[Lieuandy]

I installed version 2 and tagging whatsoever works fine, but I have a problem.

When selecting any AVI videos from the video library short-cut (left side of explorer window), every time when closing WMP 12, error said that WMP has stopped working. The fault module is wmptagplus.dll_unloaded. This happens only with AVI video, other video types are ok.

However if I select AVI files using explorer from direct file location or select within WMP, it has no problem.
Surprisingly using previous version 1.2 does not has this issue.

I am running windows 7 64-bit but using WMP 32-bit only.

It is not a big issue but only annoyance that wmp cannot close properly. Can anyone help on this.

Thanks.

[Tim De Baets]

Thanks for the detailed report WMP Tag Plus 2.0 indeed seems to cause a WMP crash when performing the actions you described. I'll start working on a fix and will post a new announcement here when it is available for download.

[andrewfg]

When I look into the Event Viewer logs (Windows/System) there is a WMP-related warning there

The Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service cannot process the request for URI 'http://192.168.1.6:10243/WMPNSSv4/2694848959/0_e0Y2OUQyNjYyLTE4MkEtNEVCNC1CQURCLUEzRjc4NjE1QzBENn0uMC40.jpg?albumArt=true' from IP address '192.168.1.6' due to error '0xc00d1906'.

Please check if you are getting the same error or perhaps a different one.

Yes, I see the same error in the log.

[Tim De Baets]

Unfortunately searching the web for that 0xc00d1906 error code doesn't bring up anything interesting. I'll try digging a bit deeper to find out what exactly that error code means (such as in the Windows SDK).

[andrewfg]

I'll try digging a bit deeper to find out what exactly that error code means (such as in the Windows SDK).

Ok.

In the meantime, I tried a few more things.

{Background the FLAC track "House of Plastic" is the bad one that shows its cover art in WMP12 but won't show its cover art on the remote renderer via WMP's Play To}

1) Using MP3Tag, I tried deleting the cover art from "House of Plastic", and adding a completely different picture. Result: still won't show its cover art on "Play To"...

2) Using FooBar, I tried converting "House of Plastic" from 24bit FLAC to 16bit FLAC. Result: still won't show its cover art on "Play To"...

3) Using MP3Tag, I tried exporting the cover art from "House of Plastic" to "folder.jpg", and deleting it from the FLAC tags. Result: now shows its cover art on "Play To"...

Hmmm...

[Tim De Baets]

{Background the FLAC track "House of Plastic" is the bad one that shows its cover art in WMP12 but won't show its cover art on the remote renderer via WMP's Play To}

This adds some more confusion because wigster clearly indicated that it was the other track ('This Is Hardcore') for which album art wasn't displayed. I am now starting to believe that Play To only shows the album art contained within the Folder.jpg file, and that it doesn't really matter whether album art is embedded or not.

I have also done some more searching for a description of the 0xc00d1906 error, but failed to find anything. The error code isn't even described in the latest Windows 8 SDK.

[andrewfg]

I am now starting to believe that Play To only shows the album art contained within the Folder.jpg file, and that it doesn't really matter whether album art is embedded or not.

No. That's not true. I does show embedded art. And most times it seems to work too.

[Tim De Baets]

It's simply impossible that Play To shows the embedded album art directly, as WMP Tag Plus only runs within the context of WMP, and never within the context of the Network Sharing Service. Hence, the Network Sharing Service itself cannot get embedded FLAC album art (or any FLAC tags for that matter).

So there must be some indirection, which is probably Folder.jpg. WMP first gets the embedded album art, with the help of WMP Tag Plus, and saves it to a Folder.jpg file. That file is then used by the Network Sharing Service to serve it to Play To.