Wednesday, January 19, 2005
Torture-Testing Windows Media Player 10
Posted by Jason Dunn in "THOUGHT" @ 05:00 PM
I've completed my new PC-based PVR (article coming soon) and as part of that setup I have 12,305 audio files on the hard drive. Because this machine is running Windows Media Center Edition 2005, and because I'll be using it with an Xbox Extender, I needed to have Windows Media Player 10 catalog all those files in it's library. Historically, I've stored my music on my server, and used WMP10 to scan the files across the network. Because of that I've seen some very frustrating and bizarre behaviour, and was generally negative on WMP10's ability to handle a large number of files. Now that I'm running it locally, I have to say that I'm more impressed - it chewed through 12,305 files in 8 minutes and 18 seconds when I added them to the database. Not bad! I then clicked on the Tools menu item "Process Media Information Now" - I fully expected the program to crash and burn. Much to my surprise, and delight, it didn't. It began to update the Media Information on all my music.
Media Information is Microsoft's term for metadata. Album, Artist, Track, all that jazz - all of the CDs that I've ripped in the past year have great metadata (thanks largely to WMP10), but tracks earlier than that are a bit of a mess. Several years back my wife and I spent an ungodly number of hours fixing the filename structure on all of our music - I had a mixture of different file naming from years of ripping CDs and acquiring legacy audio files ;-) But accurate file name does not make for complete metadata...
When I started the process last night, it got to the 50% point fairly quickly, because it knows if a file has already been updated with Media Information. As of the time of this writing, it's at 83% and still going. I think that by tomorrow morning it will be complete. I'm somewhat leery of what it will do to the files, so I've kept a complete backup copy of all my music. I remain impressed, however, that WMP10 is able to cope with so many files and keep chugging away at updating my files. Nicely done Microsoft! :D
Media Information is Microsoft's term for metadata. Album, Artist, Track, all that jazz - all of the CDs that I've ripped in the past year have great metadata (thanks largely to WMP10), but tracks earlier than that are a bit of a mess. Several years back my wife and I spent an ungodly number of hours fixing the filename structure on all of our music - I had a mixture of different file naming from years of ripping CDs and acquiring legacy audio files ;-) But accurate file name does not make for complete metadata...
When I started the process last night, it got to the 50% point fairly quickly, because it knows if a file has already been updated with Media Information. As of the time of this writing, it's at 83% and still going. I think that by tomorrow morning it will be complete. I'm somewhat leery of what it will do to the files, so I've kept a complete backup copy of all my music. I remain impressed, however, that WMP10 is able to cope with so many files and keep chugging away at updating my files. Nicely done Microsoft! :D
