I have installed the codecs from www.illiminable.com/ogg/ which allows WMP to support ogg FLAC and native FLAC (Current Stable Version (0.71.0946) - 24/02/2006). WMP11 now opens the flacs, plays them and displays the correct lenghth.

However, when I drag the progress bar to skip forward in the track, WMP11 crashes. Any ideas why, or how to fix this ?

Also, I have tagged my FLAC files using Mediamonkey, thought WMP does not recognise the album/artist info. I have installed the WMP Tag Extender (http://wmptagext.sourceforge.net/). Why does it not categorise the FLACs properly ?


Thanks

You need the unstable build 0.73.1936 in order to make FLAC decoding work better. Note that "better" doesn't implicitly mean "well".

WMPTSE will read the tag info by adding the FLACs to the Media Library instead of simply playing them back. If they were already added, then clicking the "Refresh" button inside the plugin's options should fix the issue. This doesn't always work reliably due to the illiminable filter, which is lacking the update needed to flawlessly support FLAC via DirectShow. At least in my case adding the FLAC archive to the Media Library in conjunction with WMPTSE caused a huge memory leak, which made Windows Media Player eat the whole 1.5 GB pagefile, forcing me to kill the wmplayer.exe process. But at least after having restarted the scanning process twice the whole thing has been working as expected.

Edit: Removed the quotes.

Ok, installed the unstable build (unstable build 0.73.1936) of the codec successfully. However, when I play a FLAC file, it plays it far too fast (about 3x speed) !! Also, it sometimes allows skips on the progress bar, but usually crashes WMP.

Any ideas whats going on ?

The currently available DirectShow FLAC filters are buggy. It's a development-side problem.

Are you saying that it's not possible to play FLAC files in WMP 11 ?

Can anyone help ? I just ripped my entire CD collection to FLAC and would quite like to play them, preferably in WMP11 (as I gather iTunes does not support flac).

It's possible, but a problem-free experience is far from guaranteed. See the WMP Tag Support Extender Support for help:

http://wmptagext.sourceforge.net/help.html

At the moment I'm not too worried about WMP11 reading the tags - it's getting the flacs to play properly that's the problem !

I know, but my point is that the people in those support threads are using the same setup as you, generally speaking (FLAC or some other natively unsupported codec + WMP) and could help you out more than the average HA person could. That's why I pointed you to that link.

I can't help you with your particular issue, I just don't know that much about some of this stuff. But I can say that I have WMP 11 playing FLAC files just fine, including dragging the progress bar, so I know it CAN work. I'm using the 0.71.0946 version illiminable codecs and 1.4 version of WMPTSE. Good luck with your issue!

The most obvious solution for your immediate future would be to use a different player that doesn't have these issues, such as Winamp.

Seconded

Bear in mind, (if I'm not mistaken) its easier with WMPTSE setup in order for WMP to recognize the flac files. If not, just try illuminable's latest beta codec (they are, in fact a year old) and see what happens there by opening with WMP11 on a flac. Too bad not enough dev's want to fix this problem

If TAK ever comes out with some nice directshow filters I'd take the plunge.

AFAIK, Illiminable is pretty much only one guy, and IIRC he posted here once saying that he no longer had the time to maintain the project. The funny thing is that WMP will actually detect FLAC files and add them to the library in its as-shipped state, but without playback or tagging support.

Two recent polls on a popular private site showed that, even among technically savvy people (the ones who would agitate for such features), only 11% prefer WMP for playback, and only 12% prefer FLAC as their format of choice. Assuming that the subcategory of each poll has the exact demographics of the other poll (a not too crazy leap of faith), you see that demand for FLAC playback in WMP is only ~ 1% among the technical crowd, much less among the nontechnical "average" users.

For example, I'm a hardcore WMP user myself (since 2001) and don't really care for lossless playback support as I use lossless for archiving only.

For that reason, I wouldn't hold my breath for an official or easily workable solution anytime soon.

Saw that same poll, and would agree with your reasoning, not enough demand. From what I've read, WMPTSE developer Mab_Fr (I think his name is) has tried to tackle the issue but IDK what happened. I'm pretty much in the same boat as you except for the fact that I actually want to use WMP11 for archiving AND playback, for various reasons.

If only I had to time to learn about DS's filter coding and dive into illuminible's and see whats up.

When I first decided to switch to the FLAC format, I added FLAC support to WMP 11 and mine crashed when I tried to alter the progress bar too. I saw this same issue posted on other websites with no posted solution.

Although it might be nice to fix the issue, I no longer have interest in WMP as my primary player. There are several other quality players for FLAC files




Edit: Corrected grammer.

Using Flac 1.1.2, 1.1.4, and 1.2.0, WMP 11.0.5721.5230. Illiminable 0,68 was working perfectly for me, just tried 0.71.0946. Usin TAGextender 1.4, on a winXP home with sp2 ...

Tried everything, and could not reproduce your problem. ACtually, I had never experienced this problem myself, and I have use flac with wmp a lot!

To use wmptagext you need to go to plugins>options and configure the plugin to refresh the tags!

One piece of advice: uninstall the illiminable filters, reboot, install again. As it is reported on the page, it is very important to uninstall a previous version before installing a new one...

If your media collection is only 16/44.1 or 16/48 is possible for them to work flawlessly if you replace the native FLAC container with a Matroska one (mka); just discard Illiminable; install CoreFLAC and Haali Media splitter to read matroska source files and voilá ! you can seek, go back, and do whatever you want without a hitch. My media collection was encoded in FLAC for almost three years now and this year I switched containers tired of buggy FLAC source filters; but have in mind: CoreFLAC works flawlessly as an audio decoder, but not reading the FLAC transport layer; nor the OGG one; take a look a my new post today for more details. If you have 24/96 and up source material you're still pretty in the same situation as I am know because it simply won't work with high-res material, I'm looking for a solution here and I'm sure we'll find one.

For anyone still interested, try these Directshow filters:

DC-Bass Source http://www.dsp-worx.de/?n=15

madFlac http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=130498

These are both current and still being developed.