With one of the FLAC/Ogg Directshow filters and the WMP Tag Support Extender you can now add Flac and Ogg files to the MCE 2005 library. This method works with both MCE 2004 and 2005.


Lossless Audio Blog

Hey,

Thanks, I've been looking for this information. However, it doesn't seem to work for me. I followed the instructions as given
here. Everything works fine for Windows Media Player, but for Windows Media Center Edition 2005 it doesn't seem to work.

I try to add the folders that contain the FLAC files in MCE, and it seems like they are adding ok, but when I go back to viewing the music folders in MCE, the ones I just added are not there. This only occurs if the folders contain FLAC files. MP3 and WAV work ok.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,
Guy Smiley

you might need to do some registry editing - under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.flac add two strings:
ContentType = audio/mpeg
PerceivedType = audio

Hey, thanks for the response.

Has anyone actually tried this with success? Or for that matter has anyone had this same problem? I'm not completely unfamiliar with registry editing, but I could not exactly find how to edit this entry.

Is there another solution to this problem that anyone is aware of? I'm sure there has got to be a lot of others using FLAC in MCE 2005. How the heck are you doing it?

Thanks,
Guy Smiley

I already had the two entries in the registry, however, they read like this:

ContentType = audio/flac
PerceivedType = audio

I changed the audio/flac to audio/mpeg but it made no difference. I am able to play any playlist I have containing flac material but no FLAC directories are able to be selected. It is like it isn't even recognized. Is there another work around for this since I don't really feel like trying to create a million specialized playlists to listen to my flac audio collection.

hmmm.... i was fairly certain that was all i needed to do for it to work. i'm rebuilding my mce machine at the moment so when i find out what else is required i'll let you know!

I just rebuilt this MCE macine this past weekend. not sure if it did a good install since i am still getting sime buggy lockups...

Could the fact that I have all my FLAC encoded at level 8 be a problem? I have read some people can't get certain HW players to read anything over level 2 or 3 encoding???

I have actually found that MCE is adding all the flac files in my system. Unfortunately, they are all being added to the "Unknown" album file. So apparently, MCE and WMP are recognizing them as a playable file type but are not reading the Metadata tags or anything. If you go into the "unknown" folder and select a song and choose 'edit info' it allows you to add the artist (not the album) which will then be added to them main page. So someohow MCE is renaming the Metadata to something usable. I could probably get everything noticed in MCE if I change all this data by hand, but that is 1000 files plus.

Anyone got suggestions?

This should be the job of my plug-in (WMPTSE)...

Please go to http://wmptagext.sourceforge.net/

Download the last version, install it and relaunch WMP.

The flac files should now be added as audio files (you may have to re-add it) and metatag should be read without editing by hand.

Please report on the right HydrogenAudio forum if you've got any problem (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=38400)

Thanks

MaB_fr

i tried this again on the clean installation and it worked without a hitch suggest you try what MaB_fr suggested and try it with the latest version!

also - make sure your files are tagged with an 'album artist'. MCE needs this or you'll get some strange behaviour and a lot of 'unknown artist's

Thanks, other than the crashes in WMP things might be fine. That trouble listed in the other forum topic mentioned earlier by MaB...

I believe it is my tags that are the issue since the latest release found an entire directory of my first flac encodings just fine, but put all others as 'unknown'... do you recommend to re-tag everything I have? Not sure which program would be best since I never really had to do it before If you know a program, could you possibly give an example as well of what format to use? All this help is greatly appreciated

i had all my flac's tagged using foobar and the freedb lookup before i started playing around with this. MaB's plugin pulled all of that in correctly, but all the tracks had a blank 'album artist' field. i just copied this field across from the artist field in wmp manually - but you could probably save a lot of time by using the masstager in foobar and copying across the artist field into a 'album artist' field. hope that helps!

thanks equalrightsforwerewolves! I downloaded and installed foobar last night. I am not sure if it is working with the tags since WMP keeps crashing on me with the WMPTSE plugin enabled.

And, unfortunately, with the plugin disabled, I can't check the files properly. And when I try to re-tag them in WMP using the advanced tags I am unable to since everything comes up as 'read-only'. Not sure if this is a side-effect from WMPTSE not working properly for me?

Advanced tag is an MS unextendable feature....Only compatible with MS Media & ID3 tagging....

so will the tags also show up in windows explorer?

No reason why it could be !