Media Center

Hey Mircosoft, iTunes is kicking your a$$

Eric — Tue, 09 Aug 2005 12:33:00 GMT

Why oh why does it take so darn long to load a list of Artists or Albums in My Music Application of Media Center? Come on iTunes stores it's library as an XML file and you have a binary library file. Seems to me the sort of performance argument between XML and Binary serialization - only backwards.

Windows Media Center - My Music Library

Eric — Mon, 08 Aug 2005 19:21:00 GMT

Windows Media Center has to have the Album Artist tag set in order to show up in the My Music module of Windows Media Center. Since this is driven by the Windows Media Player library those tags need to set there. Unfortunately for me almost none of those tags were set in my library so it was time for some scripting:

Dim Artist
Dim AlbumArtist
Set objPlayer = CreateObject("WMPlayer.OCX" )
Set objMediaCollection = objPlayer.MediaCollection
Set colSongList = objMediaCollection.getByAttribute("MediaType", "Audio")
For i = 0 to colSongList.Count - 1
Set objSong = colSongList.Item(i)
Artist = objSong.getItemInfo("Artist")
AlbumArtist = objSong.getItemInfo("WM/AlbumArtist")
if Artist <> AlbumArtist then
wscript.echo objSong.Name
Wscript.Echo Artist & "=" & AlbumArtist
wscript.echo
objSong.setItemInfo "WM/AlbumArtist", Artist
end if
Next

Some Company for SyncBackSE?

Eric — Mon, 08 Aug 2005 19:02:00 GMT

I've been using SyncBackSE for quite a while now and I'm almost embarrassed on how much I love this little thing. I use it to keep my music in sync between my Media Center PC and my two portable USB hard drives. I don't have too much music , only about 7600 songs, but it is such a pain to remember which tags have been updated on which drive when I go into my tag clean up frenzies which is a requirement of Media Center to have all your music diplayed in the My Music section. I also use it to keep my work laptop's data files and my local source code snippets backed up to my home drive at work. Saves me tons of time on my 4 to 5 month repaving schedule!

Now it looks like Microsoft has a similar tool on the way with SyncToy. Although I don't understand what they were thinking naming a function 'echo'...